Showing results for Aurora, CO, US
what does “unrealistically low” mean for you? 10? 3789$? this question is the mother of “it depends”. Answer from vater-gans on reddit.com
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/aws › cost for an aurora cluster
r/aws on Reddit: Cost for an aurora cluster
March 12, 2024 -

Hello Experts,

We have one non prod DB cluster in aurora postgres. We are seeing the daily cost for the RDS instance is appearing as ~$300 even we perform no activity on that database. Is there any way to further dig down and see what all queries or functions inside the database is actually contributing to these ~300$ amount?

We were initially thinking if the database backup is costing so much as the database size is ~15TB and we have 7 days backup retention set. But the cost explorer showing the cost under service "backup" as ~$2 only per day. And what should be the backup retention should we set, as it seems its occupying full DB snap each day in the storage and setting the retention for longer period (~35days for e.g.) is going to cost us more?

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Reddit
reddit.com › r/aws › aurora postgres i/o vs storage cost analysis
r/aws on Reddit: Aurora postgres I/O vs storage cost analysis
July 16, 2024 -

Hello,

We are seeing the bill section its showing the aurora postgres cost per month as ~$6000 for a r7g 8xl standard instance with DB size of ~5TB. Then going to the "storage I/O" section, its showing ~$5000 is attributed to the ~22 billion I/O requests.

So in such scenario ,

1)should we opt for I/O optimized aurora instance rather standard instance as because its noted in document that if we really have >~25% of the cost because of I/O, then we should move to I/O optimized instance?

2)Approx. how much we would be able to save if we move from standard to I/O optimized instance in above situation?

3)Also is this the correct location to see the breakup of the cost for the RDS service or any other way to see and analyze the cost usage per each component of aurora postgres?

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Reddit
reddit.com › r/aws › question on provisioning aurora postgres
r/aws on Reddit: Question on Provisioning Aurora Postgres
December 15, 2023 -

Hello All,

For provisioning Aurora postgres database for one of our existing OLTP system, in which there will be multiple applications running and those applications will be migrated slowly and will run in full capacity in an year from now. This will be a heavily used OLTP system which will consume customer transactions 24 by 7 and can grow up to ~80TB+ in size and peak read and write IOPS can go 150K+ and 10K+ respectively(based on existing oltp system statistics).I agree it wont be apple to apple comparison, but the existing OLTP system stats which runs on Oracle Exadata , its ~96 Core each node in the two node database with 200+GB memory in each node.

Now when checking AWS pricing calculator to have some guess estimate of how much cost we are going to bear for provisioning an aurora postgres instance below is what i found. The key contributor are as below..

https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/AuroraPostgreSQL

Compute Instance cost:- (Considering our workload criticality we were thinking of r6g or r7g)

r6g 4xl- 16 cpu , 128 GB memory , Standard instance costs $1515 per month and IO optimized instance costs $1970 per month.

r6g 8xl- 32 cpu , 256 GB memory , Standard instance costs $3031 per month and IO optimized instance costs $3941 per month.

r7g 4xl -16 cpu , 128 GB memory , Standard instance costs $1614 per month and IO optimized instance costs $2098 per month.

r7g 8xl- 32 cpu , 256 GB memory , Standard instance costs $3228 per month and IO optimized instance costs $4196 per month.

Storage cost:-

for "standard" instance, storage space 80TB+, considering 150K IOPS during peak hours and 10K IOPS during off peak hours and having ~1hrs daily as peak hours i.e. 30hrs peak IOPS in a month the cost comes to ~$13400.

for "I/O Optimized" instance, storage space 80TB+ and the cost comes to ~$18432/month and it doesn't depend on IOPS number.

Backup storage cost:-

As i see , even the automated backup is incremental but each of the daily snap is almost showing full size of the database. So here in our case for 80TB database, if we keep backup retention for ~15 days and considering 1 day backup retention is free , it would be (80)*(15-1)= 920TB. And its coming as ~$19783!! Is this cost figure accurate?

There are other services like performance insights , RDS proxy etc., but those cost appears to be lot lesser as compared to above mentioned services.

These costs looks to be really high and I have few questions here,

  1. Is the above compute instance cost estimation is based on ~100% CPU utilization and in reality, as we wont use 100% cpu all the time so the cost is going to be lesser?

  2. The storage cost seems to be really high, so should be worry about this, as because currently at the initial phase we may be having ~10TB of storage needed and as the day progresses we will accumulate ~80TB+ of data here at the end of the year? And should we be really go for standard instance of IO optimized one?

  3. I got some information in some blogs stating the IO optimized instance is suitable if we are spending 2/3rd of the cost in the IO. So i was wondering, how to know the percentage we are spending for IO in our case once we move to AWS aurora, so as to choose IO optimized instance over standard one?

4)Backup storage cost appears to be really high, i.e. we are seeing for having ~15 days of retention. So want to understand of the figure is accurate or i am miss interpreting anything here?

Top answer
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1). That is the cost of the instance, and won’t be less unless you use a savings plan. If you want scalable costs, you could look at aurora serverless (I’ve heard mixed things) 2) Whether or not you should worry about it depends on your business. 3) You can switch to io optimized once a month. If you’re concerned you could start with normal, and after a few days look at your costs. 4) I believe they should be incremental. If they aren’t then something else may be going on. Be aware that they may show full size (as that’s the size they’d be restored to) but actually be incremental. Best to reach out to support or do some testing. Keep in mind that Aurora is unlikely to ever be cheaper than a self hosted solution. It has a lot of other benefits (largely that you don’t have to manage it much), but I don’t think I’d transition to it for cost savings. If your older data is static, you could consider using foreign data wrappers to offload that data to a different database.
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Few thoughts: go with r7g, they have newer Nitro chips and (I believe) offer higher network bandwidth over comparable r6g May want to start with non-I/O optimized and then see if switching to I/O optimized will save money Even though the backups will show the full size, you get billed for the incremental amount(s)...the magic of the snapshots is that any snapshot for the last 35 days can be used to do a full PITR, you don't have to be concerned with multiple restores of incremental 'backups' Compute is billed on how many vCPUs you have, 0% or 100% utilization, it costs the same Finally: It may very well cost more to host this on Aurora...what you gain is flexibility on scaling, redundancy, ease of administration, etc. keep in mind that the max disk on Aurora is 128TB...you may want to split up your applications into separate databases if possible to reduce the blast radius and increase your storage capacity For a DB this large and this important, I'd really be talking directly to AWS (contact your account rep) and see if you can get a meeting some technical/engineering folks to help with these questions We've run on Aurora MySQL for many years (converting from Oracle 11g) and would never go back. There are so many things we never have to worry about any more.
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AWS
aws.amazon.com › amazon rds › amazon aurora › pricing
Amazon Aurora Pricing
6 days ago - With Aurora PostgreSQL and Aurora MySQL, you can configure your database clusters to run cost effectively, regardless of the scaling needs or evolving data access patterns of your applications. You have the flexibility to choose between the Aurora Standard and Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized configuration options to best match the price-performance and price-predictability requirements of your unique workload characteristics.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/aws › is there a way to get a realistic estimate of how much aurora would cost?
r/aws on Reddit: Is there a way to get a realistic estimate of how much Aurora would cost?
May 22, 2025 -

Our production database needs some maintenance because it was neglected for a while. Some dba friends I know keep telling me to migrate to Postgres compatible Aurora. Others tell me it is too expensive.

When I did some quick estimates in the aws calculator, the cost seems unrealistically low.

Is there some tool that would give me a better idea of how much it would realistically cost?

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Cloudexmachina
cloudexmachina.io › blog › aws-aurora-pricing
AWS Aurora Pricing Explained: What You Really Pay for and Why
September 2, 2025 - Unpack AWS Aurora pricing for Postgres & MySQL. Learn instance, storage, and scaling costs to optimize your RDS Aurora deployments like a pro.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/aws › will aurora postgresql ever be anything but a dumpster fire?
r/aws on Reddit: Will Aurora PostgreSQL ever be anything but a dumpster fire?
July 23, 2018 -
  1. Recent AWS ads in the console:

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible enterprise-class database, starting at <$1/day.

After month-long support tag, I was told I "misinterpreted" the statement. The correct interpretation of that statement was that I could get a Aurora MySQL-compatible database for <$1/day, or an Aurora PostgreSQL-compatible database for no less than $7/day (or $2.50/day with 3yr upfront reservation).

2. The pricing section for Aurora PostgreSQL (https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/) has "Serverless Pricing". Except...that Severless Pricing isn't available for Aurora PostgreSQL. This is the Aurora PostgreSQL-specific pricing section, and it's talking about pricing that simply isn't even available.

3. In the pattern of basically all Aurora docs/announcements, AWS recently announced "Amazon Aurora Backtrack – Turn Back Time" (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-backtrack-turn-back-time/). Except if you the post all the way to the bottom, you find at the very end that is "Amazon Aurora MySQL Backtrack". I guess that title isn't as exciting?

4. AFAIK it's not documented anywhere, but major version upgrades for Aurora PostgreSQL are impossible. 100% impossible. Try creating from snapshots, setting up replicas, whatever....it is 100% not possible to do a non-minor upgrade of Aurora PostgreSQL ever. You have to kludge together your own text import/export process between clusters, migration scripts, etc. which takes literally days on any decent data set. I hope you like the version of PostgreSQL you start with, because that's the one you're keeping.

---

Anyone have the inside scoop? Is Aurora PostgreSQL actually used by anybody? Is it ever not going to be a misleading and poorly supported product? Or should I go back to non-hyped vanilla PostgreSQL RDS?

Find elsewhere
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/devops › postgres rds is too expensive -
r/devops on Reddit: Postgres RDS is too expensive -
October 15, 2024 -

- I run engineering for an Indian company serving Indian customers.

- We run a multi az rds postgres on a db.m6g.12xl instance with 10tb of storage in ap-south-1

- This is costing us 12k USD per month

- We are constantly spending time optimising application performance since IOPs is a challenge

Now my question is, is anyone running postgres on data centers - I feel like the SSD storage of 100 TB with replication in multiple data centers with similar hardware would still be less expensive to us than this while giving a lot more performance. There will be some upfront investment needed but over an year it should pay for itself.

The database is both read and write heavy.

- I would like to hear stories (both good and bad) of being off the cloud and running things on your own.

- Are there alternatives to RDS postgres while giving me cost and performance benefits.

I am someone who has only worked on cloud in the last 12 years - I wonder if it makes sense to be off the cloud.

Top answer
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If you’ve never managed bare metal, especially in a hybrid cloud/on-prem fashion, now is not the time. It would be better to get off RDS and run a Postgres ec2 cluster.
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You can cut the cost in half by disabling the multi-AZ thing, because redundancy means redundant machines so twice the cost. In the end, that's a 48 vCPU 192GB of RAM box, and 10TB of SSDs, go look anywhere else and it won't be that much cheaper. Calculate how much it would cost you to build just two such machines, and put them in a datacenter. Plus the employee cost to maintain it over time, spare parts, backup storage. It's mostly upfront costs, it will be cheaper in the longer run but it might still take many months before you even break even. And then you also have to account for the machine's lifecycle: in AWS, you can just upgrade it to a 16xl if you need to, in minutes. With a real machine, when you're past the hardware lifecycle, you have to invest upfront again to upgrade it. If it breaks, someone has to physically go there and service it, and hope you have replacement parts around. In AWS, they'd transparently move you to another host and be back up in minutes. You'll also have to tune it for your hardware yourself as you no longer will have the AWS presets pretuned. You don't exactly just throw a 10GB NIC in a server and just like that you're processing 10GB of traffic: you'll probably have to configure jumbo frames and bigger rx/tx queues, etc. As others have pointed out, the bandwidth costs are probably gonna be high if you pass that over the Internet, so you'll probably also want to move all of your workloads there so traffic is local, so you also have to factor in a bunch more servers as well, and a good switch, and storage. If you want a cloud-like experience you might install something like OpenStack, and suddenly you're managing a Ceph cluster too. It's not that bad, I used to manage on-prem clusters but you know, beware of the details and gotchas. You're on your own: your own networking, your own operating systems, your own provisioning systems, your own storage solutions, your own backups, your own everything. You can't just make a VPC or a security group with metal servers, you have to configure all of that. You can't just order a new server and it boots up on its own with an AMI template.
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PlanetScale
planetscale.com › blog › amazon-aurora-pricing-the-many-surprising-costs-of-running-an-aurora-database
Amazon Aurora Pricing: The many surprising costs of running an Aurora database — PlanetScale
Plans start at just $5 per month. ... Amazon describes Aurora as a scalable database that's simple to manage, but if you've ever gone through the "Create database" wizard, you know that's not quite an accurate statement.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/aws › amazon aurora postgresql limitless database is now generally available
r/aws on Reddit: Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Database is now generally available
October 31, 2024 - No, it only scales down to 16 ACU but that is practically "zero" for multi petabyte database, since cost of storage will vastly out weigh cost for 16 ACU. The real problem with aurora postgres limitless is when it's under load as auroras serverless ...
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/aws › need some guidance on reducing the cost of my aurora serverless database.
r/aws on Reddit: Need some guidance on reducing the cost of my Aurora serverless database.
October 31, 2022 -

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

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Bytebase
bytebase.com › blog › understanding-aws-aurora-pricing
Understanding AWS Aurora Pricing (2025)
Amazon Aurora delivers high performance and availability for MySQL and PostgreSQL workloads, but its flexible pricing model — based on instance type, storage, I/O, and configuration—requires careful planning to avoid surprises.
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Vantage
vantage.sh › blog › neon-vs-aws-aurora-serverless-postgres-cost-scale-to-zero
Amazon Aurora vs Neon: A Serverless Postgres Pricing Comparison | Vantage
Aurora and Neon both announced significant pricing changes this year. We compared the two and found Neon's ability to scale to zero makes it the cost-effective choice for use cases with idle time. ... Postgres rapidly became a favorite Database Management System (DBMS) for a reason—it has data-type support, advanced features, extensibility, and more—plus all the perks of open-source software.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/aws › rds postgres vs aurora postgres
RDS Postgres vs Aurora Postgres : r/aws
January 12, 2021 - At small scale you won't see any benefit with Aurora. It'll be more expensive. You can use the Serverless version if you have spiky traffic with more than 60% low volume time for some potential savings. But otherwise just stick with regular Postgres.
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Bytebase
bytebase.com › blog › aws-aurora-vs-rds-pricing
AWS Aurora vs. RDS Pricing: A Detailed Comparison 2025
Before diving into the numbers, it's essential to understand the fundamental differences between Aurora and RDS that influence their pricing: Architecture: RDS allows you to run familiar database engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, and MariaDB.
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Pump
pump.co › home › blog › aws aurora pricing - cost breakdown & savings guide
AWS Aurora Pricing - Cost Breakdown & Savings Guide
Amazon Aurora is the relational database service managed by AWS that is compatible with both MySQL and Postgres.