AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon Aurora Serverless

Amazon Aurora Serverless makes it easy and cost-effective to run applications with intermittent or cyclical usage by auto-scaling database capacity with per-second billing

Thousands of customers, including NTT DOCOMO, Cognizant, Pagely, CB Insights, California Polytechnic State University, Currencycloud, and CourseStorm took part in the preview, saving time and reducing the cost of managing and operating database servers

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced general availability of Amazon Aurora Serverless. Aurora Serverless is a new deployment option for Amazon Aurora that automatically starts, scales, and shuts down database capacity with per-second billing for applications with less predictable usage patterns. Amazon Aurora Serverless offers database capacity without the need to provision, scale, and manage any servers. Aurora Serverless brings the power of the MySQL-compatible database built for the cloud to applications with intermittent or cyclical usage patterns without the need to manage database servers. To get started with Amazon Aurora Serverless, visit https://aws.amazon.com/aurora/serverless.

Many AWS customers have applications with intermittent or cyclical usage patterns. For example, retail applications often experience seasonal spikes. Development and test workloads require database access only at certain times of the day or week. In addition, all new applications face unknown usage demands. This creates a capacity planning dilemma for customers who must either over-provision database capacity upfront to pay for resources they will not use or under-provision resources and risk performance problems and a poor user experience. With Amazon Aurora Serverless, customers no longer have to provision or manage database capacity. The database automatically and quickly starts, scales, shuts down, and starts up again in seconds based on the needs of the workload. Customers simply create an endpoint through the AWS Management Console, and Amazon Aurora Serverless handles the rest. Customers pay by the second for database capacity only when the database is in use. Amazon Aurora Serverless brings the power of Amazon Aurora, the fastest growing service in the history of AWS, to applications that only require intermittent or cyclical database access at a fraction of the cost.

“More and more customers are moving production applications and databases from Oracle and SQL Server to Amazon Aurora because it’s a highly available, highly durable, built-for-the-cloud database at one tenth the cost of the older guard database offerings,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Databases, Analytics, and Machine Learning, at Amazon Web Services. “With the availability of Aurora Serverless, we now make it more cost effective for our customers to run intermittent or cyclical workloads that have less predictable usage patterns such as development and test workloads or applications that experience seasonal spikes, making Aurora even more attractive for every imaginable workload.”

NTT DOCOMO is the largest mobile service provider in Japan, serving more than 73 million customers. “Our data-based services are often not used at full capacity, resulting in high database running costs,” said Tomoyoshi Ohno, Vice President and General Manager of Innovation Management Department, NTT DOCOMO. “Amazon Aurora Serverless will allow NTT DOCOMO to reduce operational costs by matching capacity to actual demand. Because developers can use Amazon Aurora Serverless just like a traditional MySQL database, it will be easy to adopt in our service infrastructure.”

Pagely is the WordPress hosting leader in innovation, speed, scalability, and security, with thousands of clients ranging from the largest tech companies, to universities, creative agencies, city and state governments, and other large and midsize businesses. “We are excited by the flexibility that Amazon Aurora Serverless offers in our current managed WordPress hosting stack, and the new serverless WordPress application hosting model that it enables us to pursue,” said Joshua Strebel, Founder and CEO, Pagely. “Many of our large-scale WordPress sites have unpredictable database usage. Amazon Aurora Serverless gives us the ability to lower customer costs for these fluctuating workloads and free internal resources by eliminating the need for manual or monitored database resizing. Ultimately this is about saving time, money, and serving our customers better, and Amazon Aurora Serverless will help us do that.”

California Polytechnic State University is a nationally-ranked public university that’s driven by its core philosophy of Learn by Doing — a powerful combination of academic expertise and hands-on experience. “Our Learning Management System (LMS) is central to the student experience at Cal Poly, and we have high standards for performance, scalability and high availability,” said Alison Robinson, Associate Vice President, Cal Poly Information Technology Services. “Amazon Aurora meets our high standards. Given LMS usage patterns, with peaks during the first week of class, mid-terms, and finals, we expect to economize by paying only for the resources we need when we need them and eliminating the need for on-premises hardware. We also capitalize on the flexibility of the AWS environment that allows us to automatically shut down development and test instances when not in use, and spin them up quickly when needed.”

CB Insights is a private market intelligence firm that aggregates and analyzes massive amounts of data and uses machine learning and data visualization to help corporations answer strategic questions. “Leveraging serverless computing is key to our system architecture strategy at CB Insights as it allows us to handle bursts in computation needs in an effective and cost efficient manner,” said Pal Hoye, Chief Technology Officer of CB Insights. “We are excited about the opportunity to bring the serverless model to databases through Amazon Aurora Serverless. Through the preview program we have had early access to Aurora Serverless and it has confirmed the applicability for unpredictable data access scenarios. It’s also a good option for development/staging databases, which can be shut down when not in use to achieve additional cost savings.”

Cognizant is one of the world’s leading business and IT services companies, providing technology, consulting, and operations services to help companies digitally transform their businesses. “The launch of Amazon Aurora Serverless has been highly anticipated by the market,” said Arun Varadarajan, Vice President, AI and Analytics at Cognizant. “It complements several of our offerings, including Cognizant Adaptive Data Foundation, a solution which enables the creation of cloud-based, holistic data strategies requiring insights, scale and speed. Amazon Aurora Serverless will enhance products like Cognizant Lab Insights, an intelligent, connected lab performance management solution, because a serverless database architecture supports the intermittent data usage requirements of lab environments and provides better flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.”

Amazon Aurora Serverless (MySQL-compatible edition) is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), andAsia Pacific (Tokyo), and will expand to additional Regions in the coming year.

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Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.