First things first, what is Aurora serverless? It's a serverless database, which means that rather than paying for a server 24/7, you only pay for it when you need it. With serverless, you don't need to over-provision for sudden bursts in usage as it will scale automatically for you and scale back down when the traffic reduces.

These properties make it ideal for services that get very light usage during certain times of the day or for use in development environments. One of my favorite aspects of serverless is that you no longer need multiple databases for failovers or read-only databases as you're guaranteed availability by AWS.

The main downside is the cold start times can be a couple of seconds which isn't a problem in development environments, but depending on your use case, that could be a dealbreaker in production (however, in our situation, this is fine).

Costs

Serverless

$0.07 per hour for 1 ACU (approximately 2 GB of memory with corresponding CPU and networking). Running for the entire month will cost roughly $50 per month.

Our Typical Setup

Our typical setup for new projects that are just starting out is 2 db.t3.small which costs $0.044 per hour. This works out around $63 dollars per month.

Conclusion

For our upcoming projects, this makes sense for us to use. Especially with v2 on the horizon which has all of the features we need for a production database. Our databases rarely failover but when they do it's causes elevated heart rates while the system settles back down, not having to worry about this or maintaining read replicas is definitely worth moving over to serverless. The best thing about trying it out is that if it doesn't work out we can easily move back to our usual setup.

Recommended Reading

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/
https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/

# New Technology

Is Aurora Serverless worth moving to?