Exploring Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 Serverless Database Solution

Introduction

Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 for Aurora PostgreSQL and MySQL last year. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is a major upgrade that offers many benefits for customers looking for a serverless database solution. The major launch mentions changes in Amazon Aurora Serverless as it’s version 2. Let us first look into v1.

Amazon Aurora serverless v1 vs v2

Amazon Aurora serverless v1 has been out for many years however, it wasn’t a production viable service to use in your production applications. The reason is that serverless v1 wasn’t meant for production in the first place. It supported autoscaling, but the scaling increments were choppy, so it’d have large increases and decreases in response to fluctuating traffic. In addition, it wasn’t very good at scaling up quickly, so you would need luck if you had a burst workflow with many requests that came in all at once. The last performance problem was that if you have many requests hitting your database to scale up Amazon Aurora Serverless v1, you will wait for an instant when no queries are running against the database before it decides to scale.

Why Amazon Aurora serverless v2 is a game changer?

Now that we know a little summary on v1 let’s talk about Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 and its need. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 has some large improvements over v1. The very important purpose of v2 is to make it a production viable data store.

In addition to supporting hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 supports multi-AZ deployments, Read Replicas, Global Databases, and Amazon RDS Proxy.

Scaling relational databases vertically was complicated and expensive, including downtime. With Aurora Serverless, a relational database can be priced similarly to Amazon DynamoDB’s pay-per-request service. Also, scaling vertically and horizontally is done easily as it automatically adjusts CPU and memory capacity based on the current workload in the background without causing any interruptions. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is a game changer because it eliminates the need to provision database machines based on peak loads.

Cloud Native Database Architecture

Amazon Aurora serverless V2 uses cloud native database architecture, as shown in the figure. Compute and storage are separated to implement the decoupling of database workflow. The highlights of this cloud native database architecture are a purpose-built, log-structured, distributed storage system designed for databases, and storage volume is striped across hundreds of storage nodes distributed over three different availability zones. 6 copies of data are stored, with 2 copies in each availability zone. Database uses 4 out of 6 right quorum that provides right availability even with one AZ failure.

Advantages of using Amazon Aurora serverless v2

• Management of capacity is easier than provisioning
• During high activity periods, scaling is faster and easier
• If there is a period of low activity, it is more cost-effective
• Scaling with Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is faster, more granular, and less disruptive than v1

Pricing

Let’s investigate the pricing model offered by Amazon Aurora serverless v2.

You can set a minimum database capacity of 0.5 ACU with Amazon Aurora serverless v2. In 30 minutes, the database scales up from 0.5 ACU to 5 ACUs and then down to 0.5 ACU. In approximately 3 minutes, v2 scales down from 5 ACUs to 0.5 ACUs. The compute cost for running the workload is $0.495.

($0.18/ACU-hour x 5 ACUs x 30/60 hour + $0.18/ACU-hour x 5 ACU x 3/60)

Region: Asia Pacific (Mumbai)

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed a new version of Amazon Aurora serverless, i.e., v2. We have seen the major changes and differences between these two versions and how v2 is a game changer. There is still more to learn about Amazon Aurora serverless v2, so I encourage you to see the official documentation from AWS.

Drop a query if you have any questions regarding Amazon Aurora serverless v2 and we will get back to you quickly.

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