Hi all,

I've been reading some older threads about using Serverless v2 and see a lot of mentions of DBs never idling at 0.5.

I'm looking to migrate a whole bunch of Wordpress MySQL DBs and was thinking about migrating to Aurora to save on costs, by combining multiple DBs in one instance, as most of them, especially the Test and Staging DBs, are almost never used.

However seeing this has me worried, as any cost savings would be diminished immediately if the clusters wouldn't idle at .5 ACU.

What are your experiences with Serverless? Happy to hear them, especially in relation to Wordpress DBs!

Any other suggestions RE WP DBs are welcome too!

I have an app in production running on RDS postgresql db.r5.xlarge , the traffic is normal peaking during the day and almost sleeps during the night without any clear spikes.
I have a read replica that is used for reporting queries, this one is problematic, it has spikes whenever the users enter the google data studio reports, and even db.r5.2xlarge doesn't do the job fairly well.
I started thinking about evaluating Aurora Serverless v2 as an option, do you think using serverless will decrease the costs? what sorts of problems using serverless might cause or you have experience with?

Thanks everyone

Hey folks,
I’m managing a critical live production workload on Amazon Aurora MySQL (8.0.mysql_aurora.3.05.2), and I need some urgent help with cost optimization.

Last month’s RDS bill hit $966, and management asked me to reduce it. I tried switching to Aurora Serverless V2 with ACUs 1–16, but it was unstable — connections dropped frequently. I raised it to 22 ACUs and realized it was eating cost unnecessarily, even during idle periods.

I switched back to a provisioned db.r5.2xlarge, which is stable but expensive. I tried evaluating t4g.2xlarge, but it couldn’t handle the load. Even db.r5.large chokes under pressure.

Constraints:

• Can’t downsize the current instance without hurting performance.

• This is real-time, critical db.

• I'm already feeling the pressure as the “cloud expert” on the team 😓

My Questions:

• Has anyone faced similar cost issues with Aurora and solved it elegantly?

• Would adding a read replica meaningfully reduce cost or just add more?

• Any gotchas with I/O-Optimized I should be aware of?

• Anything else I should consider for real-time, production-grade optimization?

Thanks in advance — really appreciate any suggestions without ego. I’m here to learn and improve.

Hey there,

Sorry if I lack any technical jargon for this question, I'm still pretty novice to AWS.Right now I have a desktop application that has a leaderboard function. For this I decided with would be best to go down the RDS path. I know pretty little about connecting and running databases, so I opted to go with the serverless route, and wanted to access the database using the Aurora API/ lambda.

I saw AWS deprecated mySQL for serverless 1.0, and since serverless 2.0 does not support the aurora API, I went with the postgres option, as I could still use the API.

I think this is the first mistake, as it seems the minimum ACUs for the postgres option is double of the mySQL. But either way my database has a min and max of 2 ACUs which is probably far more than my application needs. I would estimate max, my user pool will be about 50k and its just storing simple leaderboard numbers.

After one month of running the database, my monthly bill came out to ~230 dollars, which is just a lot especially since I have not even launched this product yet.My main cost was in just running the database :

$0.08 per Aurora Capacity Unit hour running Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless

2,840.991 ACU-Hr

$227.28

So does anyone have any advice on where to start in reducing the cost ? Should I move off postgres?Would running the EC2 and manually managing the database be cheaper? Would no longer using the API be cheaper ? Any help appreciated

Edit : Wow I just realized while posting this my ACU numbers did not add up and it turns out I was running a second database all month with nothing in it. So thats half the cost atleast lol. But still my questions apply

Hello there,

I would like to have ephemeral environments for every user of our dev environment, we are going 100% Serverless (API GW, Cognito, Lambda, Step Functions, Event Bridge, Aurora Serverless V2, SQS, SNS). By relying on these services, it seems that we can now easily (and cheaply) have ephemeral environments.

Can we spin up and shut down Aurora Serverless V2 on demand? Would this be quick (a few seconds)?

If that is possible then we would pay a few bucks every time a developer creates an environment for testing purposes. I believe this would considerably reduce the friction when developing. The cost would also be low, as we wouldn't pay for extra storage (other than the SEED DB) and the computing resources would be cheap, as we can have Aurora Serverless V2 on demand.

Does anyone have any experience with this? I would like to discuss the possibilities, challenges, and tips.

Thanks

Per this linked press release Aurora Serverless V2 is now 30% faster if you have the latest version - v3. But I dont see any details. What is faster....IO? Queries? Absolutely Everything? Are all my query times going to be slashed by 30 across the board? Also does it apply to a specific version of v3? Looks like 3.10 was released a few days ago.

I checked the Aurora release notes but nothing look pertinent to such a sweeping claim of performance improvements.

Anyone have anything more substantial to share to shed some light here?

Has anyone tried the Aurora Serverless V2 preview yet?

To be honest on paper it sounds like the magic bullet. Although it's expensive on a per ACU basis, but it can scale to 0 and then up quickly (milliseconds) when needed. So if you're like me and mostly only need the db during office hours, the cost might not be a big deal.

What are your thoughts so far?

Hi

I'm new to Aurora Serverless as well as serverless services in general. I'm looking for relational db managed services that support foreign keys (I looked up planetscale, but they don't support it) that doesn't cost too much.

The usage is for hobby project.

I'm thinking to use Aurora Serverless v2 but I'm confused with the pricing calculator especially about the number of ACU running per hour. Shouldn't serverless mean "pay as you go"? Why the calculator say monthly cost?

Does the pricing calculator assume the instance keeps running and never stops due to inactivity for 30 day straight? For how long of inactivity that the db instance would stop on its own?

For a hobby project, I'm looking at database options. For my use case (single user, a few MB of storage, traffic measured in <20 transactions a day), DynamoDB seems to be very cheap - pretty much always in free tier, or at the pennies-per-month range.

But I can't find a SQL option in a similar price range - I tried to configure an Aurora Serverless Postgres DB, and the cheapest I could make it was about $50 per month.

Is there any free- or near-free SQL database option for my use case?

I'm not trying to be a cheapskate, but I do enjoy how cheap serverless options can be for hobby projects.

(My current monthly AWS spend is about $5, except when Route 53 domains get renewed!).

Thanks.

So Aurora pricing is based on I/O compute and storage, and not actual uptime of the DBs (https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/)

So how is Aurora Serverless any more cost effective than regular Aurora? Aurora Serverless's main feature is automatic start/stopping. If I'm not actually paying for uptime in Aurora, then why do I want to sacrifice the performance of my app by using Aurora Serverless, if there's no actual cost difference?

I have a small online business with a MySQL database that idles during the week and hits (sometimes substantial) peak loads on weekends.

The Aurora Serverless v2 autoscaling sounds like an attractive solution for that. However, Aurora Serverless v2 being cost-effective for us relies on the assumption that it can idle at 0.5 ACUs when the database isn't in use.

What I found in testing is that the cluster will never idle below 1.0 ACUs, and will occasionally bump up to 1.5 ACUs. This is presumably because of the ongoing activity (3 selects/second or so) by the AWS rdsadmin user which I understand is common to all Aurora instances.

This, of course, doubles the base monthly cost for us.

Does anyone know if it's possible to tweak any settings anywhere to achieve a consistent Aurora Serverless v2 idle state at 0.5 ACUs? It seems odd that AWS would offer an autoscaling minimum that can never be achieved in practice.

Data models clearly have relationships between them. In addition, I will need to have a read heavy db. I’m most certain at this stage of my startup having a sql makes more sense than nosql.

As I build my MVP reads and writes will be very low. Should I implement my db with Aurora Postgres or Aurora Serverless Postgres?

Note: I am choosing Aurora over Rds to not deal with any maintenance since I am the only developer and my main focus should be development.