In the age of serverless architecture, Amazon has created a setting of Amazon Aurora to cater to applications that need databases that can automatically start, stop, and scale as needed. Amazon Aurora Serverless lets you set up a cloud database without needing to create or manage database instances—perfect for workloads that need to run only occasionally or unpredictably.
Why Use Amazon Aurora Serverless?
Ease-of-Use
Users no longer have to manage, configure, and scale databases. Aurora Serverless shuts down and starts up as needed without manual intervention.
Autoscaling
Compute and memory scales automatically according to what you need, so you don’t have to deal with downtime.
Reduces Cost
With Aurora Serverless, you only pay for what you use per second. If the database instance is not running, you don’t get charged.
Data Safety
Aurora Serverless is highly available due to being distributed, fault-tolerant, and self-healing. Six separate replicas of your data exist to mitigate data loss.
Where to Use Aurora Serverless
- Rarely or intermittently-used applications – If you have an application that only needs to be run a few times each day or every other day, Aurora Serverless minimizes the cost of your usage since you only pay when it’s active.
- Unsure of what Instance Size is required – For new applications in particular, it may be difficult to gauge this. You can solve this with Aurora Serverless by creating an endpoint and leave the database instance to scale by itself as needed.
- Unpredictable or Lightly-Used Applications – for applications that are lightly-used and will suddenly see peak usage at various times of the month or year: websites that feature news or films, budgeting applications, operational reports, and so on. Aurora Serverless will scale up and down as required.
- Development and Test – For databases that need to be used only in shifts or sporadic periods of development and QA. The database will shut itself down when not being used.
Amazon Aurora Serverless Pricing per second can be found here. To get started with Aurora Serverless, select Serverless when generating an Aurora database cluster. You have the choice to indicate the database capacity you want and which applications to connect.