Amazon Aurora Serverless

Use Cases

Infrequently-Used Applications

You have an application which is only used for a few minutes several times per day or week, such as a low-volume blog site, and you want a cost-effective database that only requires you to pay for it when active. With Aurora Serverless, you only pay for the database resources you consume.

New Applications

You are deploying a new application and are unsure of what instance size you need. With Aurora Serverless, you simply create an end-point and let the database auto-scale to the capacity requirements of your application.

Variable Workloads

You are running a lightly used application, with peaks of 30 minutes to several hours a few times each day or several times per year, such as in HR, budgeting, operational reporting, etc. With Aurora Serverless, you no longer have to provision to either peak or average capacity.

Unpredictable Workloads

You are running workloads where there is database usage throughout the day, but also peaks of activity that are hard to predict. For example, a traffic site where you might see a surge of activity when it starts raining. With Aurora Serverless, your database will auto-scale capacity to meet the needs of the application's peak load and scale back down when the surge of activity is over.

Development/Test Databases

Your developers are using databases during work hours but don’t need them on nights or weekends. With Aurora Serverless, your database automatically shuts down when not in use.

Multitenant Applications

With Aurora Serverless, you don't have to individually manage database capacity for each application in your fleet. Aurora manages individual database capacity for you, saving you valuable time.

Pricing

With Aurora Serverless, there are no instances to manage. Your database capacity automatically scales up or down to meet your application workload needs and shuts down during periods of inactivity, saving you money. You only pay for database storage and the database capacity and I/O your database consumes while it is active. For full pricing and regional availability see Amazon Aurora Pricing . 

Database Capacity

In Aurora Serverless, database capacity is measured in Aurora Capacity Units (ACUs). 1 ACU has approximately 2 GB of memory with corresponding CPU and networking, similar to what is used in Aurora Standard instances. You pay a flat rate per second of ACU usage, with a minimum of 5 minutes of usage each time the database is activated.

As your database capacity is automatically scaled up or down, ACUs are added or removed. Aurora Serverless can scale from a minimum of 2 ACUs to a maximum of 256 ACUs. You can specify the minimum and maximum ACUs your database can consume.

Database Storage & I/O

Storage consumed by your Amazon Aurora database is billed in per GB-month increments and I/Os consumed are billed in per million request increments. You pay only for the storage and I/Os your Amazon Aurora database consumes and do not need to provision in advance. Amazon Aurora storage and I/O prices are the same for Standard and Serverless configurations.

Pricing Example 1

You are running a news website using an Aurora Serverless database with a storage size of 80 GB. While there is light load on the site most of the time, there are peaks of activity in the morning or as news stories break. For example, there is a period of 1 hour, 10 minutes and 15 seconds in the morning where the database scales to 4 ACUs and a period of 40 minutes and 34 seconds after a breaking news story where the database is scaled up to 8 ACUs. The remainder of the day (22 hours, 12 minutes, and 46 seconds), the database runs at a capacity of 2 ACUs. In total, you also used 90,000 I/O operations during the day.

You will be billed for the following usage during this period:

Duration ACUs ACU-Hours Rate Charges

22 hours, 12 minutes, and 46 seconds (22.213 hours)

2 44.26 $0.06 $2.66 1 hour, 10 minutes, and 15 seconds (1.020 hours) 4 4.08 $0.06 $0.25 40 minutes and 34 seconds (0.676 hours) 8 5.408 $0.06 $0.32 Usage total for 24 hours 29.60 $0.06 $3.23

You are also billed for database storage and I/O during this 24 hour period.

Your total charges for the period are:

Usage Rate Charges 29.60 ACU-hours $0.06 per ACU-hour* $3.23 80 GB of storage for 24 hours $0.10 per GB-month $0.26 90,000 I/O requests $0.20 per 1 million requests Total charges for 24 hours $3.51

*Example price per hour is for US East (N. Virginia). Pricing varies by region.

Pricing Example 2

You create an Aurora Serverless database for your application test environment, with a database storage size of 200 GB. You perform two test runs over a 24 hour period. During the initial test pass, Aurora runs at a capacity of 4 ACUs for 44 minutes and 6 seconds and performs 60,000 I/O requests before pausing after the test is complete. After being idle for 4 hours, it turns back on when you begin another test pass. During the second test, it runs at a capacity of 8 ACUs for 30 minutes and 8 seconds and performs 80,000 I/O requests before being paused again for the rest of the day.

You will be billed the following during this period:

Duration ACUs ACU-Hours Rate Charges

44 minutes and 6 seconds (0.735 hours)

2.940 $0.06 $0.18 30 minutes and 8 seconds (0.502 hours) $0.06 $0.24 Usage total for 24 hours 6.957 $0.06 $0.42

You are not charged for the time while the database is paused. You are billed for database storage and I/O over this 24 hour period.

Your total charges for the period are:

Usage Rate Charges 6.957 ACU-hours $0.06 per ACU-hour* $0.42 200GB of storage for 24 hours $0.10 per GB-month $0.66 60,000 + 80,000 = 140,000 I/O requests $0.20 per 1 million requests $0.03 Total charges for 24 hours $1.11

*Example price per hour is for US East (N. Virginia). Pricing varies by region.