Hey everyone, I'd like to validate an approach before diving a rabbit hole of setup:

• We have a fairly standard baseline use to our Aurora databases, so we use a couple r7g.large instances in each of the major regions we operate. This is great 99.9% of the time.

• However, within each region things can get spikey - often only for a few minutes each day - which can cause degraded performance as we go over our provisioned vCPUs.

• My reading is that you can setup Aurora Serverless v2 to sit as a reader alongside regular RI readers, so traffic can go to both types at the same time, and this will be handled by RDS Proxy.

So the core assumption I'm looking to validate: can I use RIs to cut costs for our baseline usage and use Aurora Serverless v2 to sit on standby to handle spikiness? I realise there might be an obvious answer based on my last bullet point above, but every blog post I'm reading always compares the two services as an either/or option, and typically concludes that Aurora Serverless v2 ends up simply being more expensive because it doesn't make sense for baseline usage. I haven't found any posts of people talking about this setup.

Follow on questions that I'm also not getting clear answers on:

• Is RDS Proxy intelligent enough when you're using readers and serverless together (i.e. will it start sending spiky traffic to serverless, rather than splitting amongst all readers?)

• Can our apu be left at 0.5 and it will autoscale to any capacity we need, or should we try and optimise our apu minimum to be equal to the memory our database typically needs? Is there a simple way of working this out?

• What are the other gotchas that we should be considering?

Final more unrelated question:

• We don't have an AWS support contract today. If we had one, would they be good at answering these types of questions, or are they more useful for just having someone to call when something goes wrong?