One major criticism of AWS Aurora Serverless V2 has lingered ever since its release back in 2020: it wasn't actually serverless.
Now the allegedly sans-server version of Amazon's relational database service has belatedly fulfilled its destiny and become the product it always claimed to be.
Until yesterday, Aurora Serverless v2 was not truly “serverless” because it did not scale to zero, therefore imposing a minimum cost even when idle.
This situation has now changed following an AWS announcement which said: "Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 now supports scaling capacity down to 0 ACUs [Aurora Capacity Unit], enabling you to optimize costs during periods of database inactivity. Aurora Serverless is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration of Aurora that automatically adjusts your database capacity based on your workload requirements."
Aurora Serverless now measures database capacity in Aurora Capacity Units (ACUs) billed per second. One ACU has approximately 2 GiB of memory with corresponding CPU and networking similar to that used in Aurora provisioned instances.
"With this new launch and recent launch of maximum capacity of 256 ACUs, your serverless instance can now scale between 0 ACUs and 256 ACUs," AWS wrote.
Aurora Serverless v2 can automatically pause after detecting inactivity, scaling to 0 ACUs to eliminate compute charges during downtime (although storage costs still apply). The database resumes automatically within approximately 15 seconds whenever a connection is requested, with billing resuming per ACU per second, a feature that's useful for cost-sensitive use cases like development, testing, or applications that can tolerate cold starts.
Celebrating serverless
News of the AWS update prompted a lot of exclamation marks and excitable posts on LinkedIn.
Sam Williams, who describes himself as The Serverless Obsessive, wrote: "Serverless Aurora is finally Serverless! It now scales to ZERO!!
"This was a pain point with Aurora before - 0,5 =~ $43 / month fixed cost. If you're building an app that you use once a week for 30 minutes then it's a waste of money.
"Now it's WAY better."
Tom Cross, a self-confessed "FinOps nerd" and Cloud Infrastructure Technical Lead at Aer Lingus, said: "Christmas keeps coming early for FinOps practitioners on AWS, allowing Aurora serverless to scale to zero is a game changer! Perfect solution for bringing some elasticity to your non-production environments!"
Magnus Eriksson, Architect and Cloud Specialist, also wrote: "With this, we can keep serverless databases (in particular for test environments) running even when there is no traffic at nights and weekends just like we can with the rest of our Lambda function-based system!
"Now I would just like to see this for all the other so-called "serverless" AWS services lacking this like Elastic Search Serverless etc. - go for it AWS and show that "serverless" is no longer just a meaningless marketing term!"
