🐾Aurora Limitless vs Serverless v2🐾

🤓 Have you heard about Amazon Aurora Limitless? How it is different from Aurora Serverless v2 and when to use each of them? Let’s explore the difference together.

Aurora Limitless

Aurora Limitless is a serverless-based database service, which is fully compatible with PostgreSQL engine. It allows to use fully managed sharding for large scales of data and high number of operations. It takes care of quering several instances, ensuring consistency of data between them and handling all maintenance overhead.

Use cases:

• You have already implemented sharding for several RDS instances on your own, but want to handover the maintenance to someone else.

• You want to start using sharding because your workload is growing and approaching the limits.

Pricing (eu-central-1):

• Aurora I/O-Optimized $0.19

Despite the fact that Aurora Limitless is serverless, you cannot scale it down to 0 or pause. Minimum capacity for it is 16 ACUs.

If you interested in more details on Aurora Limitless architecture, I suggest watching AWS re:Invent 2023 - Achieving scale with Amazon Aurora Limitless Database.

Aurora Serverless v2

Aurora Serverless is a serverless-based database service, which is fully compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL engines. It helps in use cases when configuring capacity correctly in advance isn't possible which leads to higher costs due to overprovisioned capacity.

Use cases:

• Workloads with unpredictable load or spikes in traffic.

• Workloads which are idle from time to time.

• Development and testing environments.

Pricing (eu-central-1):

• Aurora Standard $0.14

• Aurora I/O-Optimized $0.19

You can configure database with minimum capacity of 0 ACUs and use Pause after inactivity feature, so database is paused during inactivity periods. The time to resume is typically approximately 15 seconds if the instance was paused for less than 24 hours. Also, there are some conditions, such as an hanging open connection, when instance won’t pause, full list can be found in documentation.

Bonus content

🎁 Interesting AWS whitepaper about Aurora internals.
🎁 Example of self-implemented sharding at Notion

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Thank you for reading, let’s chat 💬

💬 Do you use RDS or Aurora for your workloads?
💬 Have you tried Aurora Serverless v2?
💬 Maybe you’re the one who tried Aurora Limitless during the preview?

I love hearing from readers 🫶🏻 Please feel free to drop comments, questions, and opinions below👇🏻