The PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Aurora Serverless is now generally available, offering an alternative to the MySQL version.
Amazon Aurora Serverless is an auto-scaling version of Amazon Aurora that automatically starts up, shuts down and scales up or down based on your application workload.
Provisioned Aurora is designed to be highly durable and available, which it achieves by automatically replicating data across multiple Availability Zones and continuously backing up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). It is designed to offer greater than 99.99 percent availability and automatically detect and recover from most database failures in less than 60 seconds, without crash recovery or the need to rebuild database caches.
When you create a database with Aurora Serverless, you set the minimum and maximum capacity. Your client applications transparently connect to a proxy fleet that routes the workload to a pool of resources that are automatically scaled. Scaling is very fast because resources are “warm” and ready to be added to serve your requests.
The storage layer is independent from the computing resources used by the database, and you don't need to provision storage in advance. The minimum storage is 10GB and, based on the database usage, the Amazon Aurora storage will automatically grow up to 64 TB in 10GB increments.
The disadvantage of using the serverless model is that the costs are higher when looked at per hour for the processor and storage combination. This makes sense in situations where your demand fluctuates as you're not paying for storage and processing unless you actually need to use it.
Another potential drawback is that Aurora serverless DB clusters are located in a single availability zone (AZ), whereas the provisioned clusters can be set up to span multiple AZs. This means that should your serverless cluster become unavailable, it will have to be recreated on another AZ, whereas in the equivalent provisiooned cluster you could failover straight away.
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Amazon has released new services for AWS Lambda SnapStart, Amazon's performance optimization that aims to significantly improve the startup time for applications.
