AWS Unveils Aurora Serverless Database

The future beckons. AWS has announced Aurora Serverless, a new database service that is perfect for easily and quickly launching relational databases that don’t need continuous data processing.

As the name suggests, this new service is built on top of the existing Aurora database system that Amazon Web Services offers to users of its cloud platform. In other words, this is basically the database equivalent of a serverless, event-driven compute platform.

Amazon provided the details of this new launch in a blog post, which it unveiled at re:Invent, the company’s annual cloud conference.

The most notably feature of Aurora Serverless is that data storage is kept separate from the processing. Meaning, users only pay for the processing when the database is actually doing work. Storage costs extra, obviously, but that is your standard, affordable affair.

Aurora Serverless is only in preview right now, but will go live at some point next year.

Once it does, developers will have access to an on-demand, serverless relational database that will not require provisioning. Users will only pay when the database is in use, and that too by the second. In addition to that, they will be able to easily scale it up and down as and when needed.

This is a completely different approach to how things currently are setup, where users have to spin up a machine to run it. Aurora Serverless does all of this for you, and on top of that is ideal for use cases that don’t need continuous data processing.

AWS has promised to share more information about Aurora Serverless in due time.