Amazon AWS Aurora Serverless MySQL is now Generally Available

Amazon AWS has announced General Availability of its Aurora Serverless MySQL RDBMS.

With Amazon Aurora Serverless MySQL, databases running inside can automatically start-up, shut down and scale up or down on capacity depending on the application’s needs.

What is Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible relational database built for the cloud and Amazon claims that Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. Aurora is distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB per database instance with continuous backup to Amazon S3 and replication across three availability zones. Aurora takes care of automating administration tasks such as database setup, patching, backups and hardware provisioning.

What is Serverless?

Serverless computing paradigm allows running applications and services without any efforts of provisioning underlying servers, services that scale automatically and helps developers focus on applications and services.

What is AWS Aurora Serverless MySQL?

As of now, AWS Aurora serverless MySQL supports MySQL 5.6 version. Users can select minimum and maximum Aurora Capacity Units (ACU) in the wizard. The Aurora cluster can scale up and down the capacity automatically based on the ACU settings configured. Considering separation of storage and compute layers, when the cluster is paused, only storage cost is charged. For AWS Aurora serverless, customers are charged per second.

According to the blog post, "The service currently has autoscaling thresholds of 1.5 minutes to scale up and 5 minutes to scale down. That means metrics must exceed the limits for 1.5 minutes to trigger a scale up or fall below the limits for 5 minutes to trigger a scale down. The cooldown period between scaling activities is 5 minutes to scale up and 15 minutes to scale down. Before scaling can happen the service has to find a “scaling point” which may take longer than anticipated if you have long-running transactions. Scaling operations are transparent to the connected clients and applications since existing connections and session state are transferred to the new nodes. The only difference with pausing and resuming is a higher latency for the first connection, typically around 25 seconds. "

Amazon Aurora Serverless is available in Aurora MySQL is available now in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo).