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?

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?

I've been exploring AWS Aurora for my database needs, and while the service seems promising, I'm a bit confused about its pricing structure.

Is it true that, even if your Aurora DB instance is idle and not receiving any requests, there's still a minimum of 0.5 ACU 'in usage', which contributes to the billing. This information is not really visible in the AWS Pricing examples.

If anybody is using Aurora DB do you recommend it and how much do you pay for which cluster?

For some reason, I am being billed storage io usage a LOT... And my snapshot sizes are increasing daily - i had a query running for some reason that didnt die for a few days and was at 90% of CPU... I finally managed to kill it, but i dont know if im going to continue to get billed now? None of the tables in my DB have increased in size - What do i need to do now to get this under control? My snapshots were alwasy around 240g.

Do you get charged for EC2 instances on top of Aurora pricing for using Aurora?

Or are the prices in that page (0.10 $ / GB + 0.20 $ / M request per month) include everything?

Recently we've been speaking to our account managers at AWS about RDS right sizing. We have a MySQL m5.4xl instance with two read replicas used for reporting and ad-hoc tasks (m5.2xl and m5.xl).

We're working on some improvements to reduce CPU spikes at the moment so we can switch to a memory optimised instance.

Aurora is interesting and we'd like to try it so we've been discussing POCs with the team.

How would you begin to estimate IO costs on Aurora vs RDS MySQL? Aurora seems to be measured in IO by pages read/written whilst RDS works in IOPS. Is this a similar metric? Our application is fairly IO heavy and it's very old so has some performance issues dotted around which don't help.

We've asked the AWS database guys about this but are still waiting for a reply. Wondering if anyone else has had experience with switching?

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?

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.

Difference between RDS and Aurora, when hosting Java application with PostgreSQL database.

Here i have my estimated pricing for using RDS. I suppose this is a separate server for actually hosting the database (hence the price) I found this alternative Aurora, which seemed a little bit better in regards to pricing.

This is much cheaper and also allows for almost the same amount of data (and up 1 million requests).

Can anyone explain to me the major differences in regards to these two services?

Does anyone know what the pricing is for the new Aurora DSQL serverless database service? I can't find anything in the documentation. It would be great if its similar in price to dynamodb.

I think Aurora is the best in class but its IOPS pricing is just too expensive

Is this something AWS can't do anything about because of the underlying infra? I mean regular RDS IO is free.

/rant

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 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