Speaker: Renato Losio @ AWS Amarathon 2025
Summary by Amazon Nova
Five Hard Lessons from Five Years of So-Called Serverless Databases
- Serverless is not Serverless. Or Vice Versa?
Introduction of serverless databases on Amazon Web Services
Aurora Serverless v1 GA (2018-08)
DynamoDB On-Demand (2018-11)
Amazon Timestream (2020-09)
Aurora Serverless v2 Preview (2020-12)
Aurora Serverless v2 GA (2022-04)
Redshift Serverless (2022-07)
Amazon Neptune Serverless (2022-10)
ElastiCache Serverless (2023-11)
Amazon DSQL (2025-05)
DocumentDB Serverless (2025-07)
What about...
Amazon S3
Amazon SQS
Amazon Route 53?
Storage is Underrated
Aurora Serverless v2 scales instantly to support even the most demanding applications, delivering up to 90% cost savings compared to provisioning for peak capacity
USD/Month
2022: 3336 CPU (RI), 1960 Storage (GP), 2274 Backup
2023: 4682 CPU (RI), 2387 Storage (GP), 3300 Backup
2024: 6006 CPU (RI), 2994 Storage (GP), 5840 Backup
2025: 6350 CPU (RI), 3755 Storage (GP), 6952 Backup
Aurora Serverless: min 0.5 ACU
Aurora Provisioned: db.r8g.large
RDS for MySQL: 400 GB + db.r8g.large
How Long?
Aurora Serverless: 3-4 seconds
Aurora Provisioned: 2-3 seconds
RDS for MySQL: 4-5 minutes
Predicting Costs is More Challenging
"If you do not know how your workload performs on a serverless DB, forecasting ACU by using the baseline of a provisioned cluster is entirely useless."
"Aurora DSQL is now Generally Available. What’s it cost? Nobody knows, especially Amazon Web Services. You get charged per DPU, which equates in the documentation to 'screw you, benchmark your workloads and find out for yourself.' Of all the pricing strategies from which to choose, I didn’t expect Amazon Web Services to pick 'completely give up.' My Aurora customers are... displeased." Corey Quinn
Compatibility Might Be a Challenge
Compatibility?
Wire (or Client Protocol)
SQL / Query Language
Feature / Behavior
Operational / Ecosystem
Version
DSQL, Dynamo DB, Aurora Serverless (*)
Both "Serverless" databases
Horizontal vs Vertical is the Question
Elasticity is not serverless
"If the database still doesn't scale down to the minimum capacity configured, then stop and restart the database to reclaim any memory fragments that might have built up over time. Stopping and starting a database results in downtime, so we recommend doing this sparingly." (Amazon Web Services doc)
Leverage serverless database, work on elasticity, and understand what runs under the hood
Team:
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