A Serverless Future for a Database from the Past
January 17, 2019

A Serverless Future for a Database from the Past

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Aurora

The engineering team uses Amazon Aurora Serverless to rapidly build services that are inexpensive to operate and maintain. Aurora Serverless is an ideal datastore for low-volume or bursty services that can tolerate its cold starts; services consumed by batch jobs are an example. Amazon Aurora Serverless is a fast MySQL 5.6-compatible datastore; it helps our small team because it is managed and very inexpensive.
  • Aurora's throughput is great compared to MySQL and MariaDB.
  • Aurora Serverless's pay-per-use makes it very inexpensive when used for services that are idle most of the day. This helps us adhere to the one-database-per-microservice pattern; cost is no longer a concern.
  • Aurora is mostly managed. Administering databases will never be a competitive advantage for my company.
  • Aurora has great integration with other AWS products, like DMS.
  • Cold-starts are part of the Aurora Serverless compromise, but they are painful nonetheless.
  • We're accustomed to sub-second metering for AWS Lambda; Aurora Serverless has 1-minute minimums for resources.
  • Aurora Serverless is compatible with MySQL 5.6. MySQL 5.6 lacks many of the features PostgreSQL users will expect.
  • Aurora Serverless has allowed us to inexpensively implement best-practices for our microservices architecture.
  • Aurora is mostly managed; our engineers can focus on features instead of database administration.
  • Aurora is capable of high throughput. Speed is not our first priority, but we still benefit from it.
Aurora MySQL 5.6 lacks many of the features of PostgreSQL, and even more recent versions of MySQL or MariaDB. You may be able to tolerate these deficiencies; simple OLTP use-cases will be served adequately. Like RDS and DynamoDB, Aurora is managed and integrates well with other AWS products. Amazon Aurora Serverless can be much less expensive than RDS, however.
Amazon Aurora Serverless is great for micro-services and serverless. If DynamoDB's pricing structure and management appeal to you, but you want a RDBMS, consider Amazon Aurora Serverless. If you have a microservices architecture and are apprehensive about the cost of one-RDS-instance-per-service for every test cluster, consider Amazon Aurora Serverless. Aurora MySQL lacks many features you'd expect from PostgreSQL; the absence of these features may be more tolerable for OLTP use-cases than OLAP use-cases.