Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 removes the complexity of managing database capacity

Amazon Web Services released Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, the next generation of Amazon Aurora Serverless that automatically scales to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second to support even the most demanding applications.

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 scales capacity in fine-grained increments based on an application’s needs, providing customers up to 90% cost savings compared to provisioning database capacity for peak load. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 also includes Amazon Aurora’s capabilities for high availability, performance, and resiliency, with low latency and fast querying. There are no upfront commitments or additional costs to use Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, and customers only pay for the database capacity used.

Customers often face a dilemma when managing database capacity—provision too much and overspend, or underestimate capacity needs and risk application downtime. Since launching in 2018, Amazon Aurora Serverless has been used by tens of thousands of customers as a cost-effective database option for applications that have infrequent, intermittent, or unpredictable traffic, like test and development workloads.

V1 of Amazon Aurora Serverless scales database capacity within five to 50 seconds by doubling capacity each time it is needed—­­and because it is serverless, customers don’t have to worry about managing database capacity. However, to run a wider variety of production workloads with Amazon Aurora Serverless, customers need capacity to scale in fractions of a second and in more precise increments. These customers also want to take advantage of the full range of Amazon Aurora’s capabilities.

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 automatically scales database workloads to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second to support even the most demanding applications. Instead of doubling capacity every time a workload must scale, Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 continuously monitors database activity and adjusts capacity in fine-grained increments to provide just the right amount of database resources an application needs. With Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, customers only pay for the capacity they consume, which can save up to 90% of database costs when compared to the cost of provisioning for peak capacity.

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 also provides the full breadth of Amazon Aurora’s capabilities, including using multiple AWS Availability Zones for high availability, Global Database for local reads with low latency, Read Replicas for high performance, and Parallel Query for faster querying. As a result, Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is ideal for a much broader set of applications. For example, Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 can now support enterprises that have hundreds of thousands of applications and must manage capacity across their entire fleet of databases, as well as software as a service (SaaS) vendors that have multi-tenant environments with hundreds of thousands of databases that each support a different customer.

“Amazon Aurora is the first relational database built from the ground up for the cloud. Today, more than a hundred thousand customers choose to run their database workloads on Amazon Aurora because it delivers the performance and availability of the highest-grade commercial databases at one-tenth the cost,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Databases, Analytics, and Machine Learning at AWS. “With the next generation of Amazon Aurora Serverless, it is now even easier for customers to leave the constraints of old-guard databases behind and enjoy the immense cost savings of scalable, on-demand capacity with all of the advanced capabilities in Amazon Aurora.”

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is generally available today for MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions of Amazon Aurora in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), and South America (São Paulo), with availability in additional AWS Regions coming soon.

3M is one of the world’s largest providers of software for the health care industry. “At 3M, we are committed to empowering clinicians, providers, and payers by reducing the administrative burden of technology,” said Dhanraj Shriyan, Enterprise Data Architect at 3M. “Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 helps us take huge steps toward this goal by automatically scaling database resources based on our business needs, enabling us to spend less time managing database capacity and more time solving customer challenges.”

SmugMug is a paid image sharing service, image hosting service, and online video platform on which users can upload photos and videos. The company facilitates the sale of digital and print media for amateur and professional photographers. “As the world’s largest photographer-focused community, SmugMug is built on AWS to provide our customers with a secure, fast, and reliable service to store, share, and sell their photography,” said Don MacAskill, CEO & Chief Geek of SmugMug. “With Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, we can innovate more with the fine-grained scalability that removes the overhead of peak capacity planning—and the associated costs of paying for more than we need, saving our customers money while accelerating performance.”

Pagely is a leading managed WordPress hosting platform. “Managing database capacity with spiky and unpredictable workloads is a challenging and resource-intensive task,” said Joshua Eichorn, Chief Technology Officer at Pagely. “With Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, that task is much simpler. We no longer need to worry about fluctuating and unpredictable workloads—database capacity scales automatically by just the right amount to meet demand, keeping up with any spike regardless of size, and scaling down when demand decreases, to minimize costs.”

UJET offers an all-in-one cloud contact center platform, developed specifically to transform customer experience for the digital economy and smartphone era. “Because our workloads can vary drastically based on the time of the day, we either need to constantly adjust database capacity or over-provision for peak usage,” said Dave Bullock, Vice President of Engineering at UJET. “Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 scales to just the right amount of capacity on demand to support our workload needs, helping us save cost without compromising customer experience.”

The Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) is one of the largest community college districts in the United States. “At MCCCD, we work hard to ensure that high-quality education is accessible and affordable for all of our students,” said Joseph Licata, Associate Chief Information Officer at MCCCD.

“Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 can help us optimize costs, automate maintenance and patching, and ensure high availability across our district. We are building exciting new student support technology tools, specifically designed to take advantage of these serverless capabilities, to solve problems with fewer technical resources. By applying patches and maintenance quickly and automatically, we also decrease our threat surface by ensuring our environment is up to date, freeing up our team to focus on delivering transformational technology solutions that improve the student experience.”