AWS will soon withdraw support for database manager Aurora Serverless version 1, ending Amazon’s scale-to-zero database. Companies should switch to Aurora Serverless 2 to continue receiving support for the product.
However, the new version does not support scale-to-zero. Following the ‘scale-to-zero’ strategy is important for some enterprises. With this, a serverless application automatically scales down when there is no traffic. When traffic does reappear, the application automatically scales again.
When Aurora Serverless was launched in mid-2018, it also promised that provisioning and managing database capacity was no longer necessary. Organizations paid only when the database was used, subsequently on a per-second basis. With Aurora Serverless 2, payment is no longer only when the database is used.
Change
Aurora Serverless now always bills based on Aurora Capacity Units (ACUs). An ACU provides approximately 2GB of memory. In version 1, a database cluster scaled down to no capacity (0 ACUs) if there were no active connections. However, companies still had to pay about 10 cents per GB monthly for database storage.
With version 2 of Aurora Serverless, the pricing model is going up. There will always be a minimum of 0.5 ACU. An ACU has U.S. prices of $0.12 (€0.11) per hour. If an Aurora Serverless 2-instance is virtually unused for the entire month, that still adds to a monthly cost of $45.
This change is partly due to the evolution in the use of the database manager. Version 1 was primarily used for infrequently used applications, development work, and database testing. AWS is now pitching Aurora Serverless for use cases such as variable workloads, unpredictable workloads and enterprise database fleet management.
Companies that want to continue receiving support for the service have until Dec. 31, 2024, to migrate. After that date, the scale-to-zero version will no longer be supported.
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