AWS Generally Releases Aurora Serverless MySQL

The first serverless version of Amazon Web Services' extremely popular Aurora relational database, one compatible with MySQL, became generally available on Friday.

Aurora Serverless, combining two ascending technologies in the AWS toolset, automatically scales up and down without requiring customers to provision resources, helping them save on their cloud spend.

The service had been available through a preview program since its introduction at the AWS re:Invent conference last November.

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The cloud-native Aurora database, and serverless functionality as a whole, "are two pieces of the growing AWS technology story," Randall Hunt, AWS senior technical evangelist, wrote in a blog post.

"You don’t have to think about instances or scaling and you pay only for what you use," Hunt said of the latest AWS offering.

That can deliver cost savings when running production applications with unpredictable loads and infrequent demand. Or in the development phase, the service can automatically pause clusters when they're not needed, Hunt added.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy introduced Aurora Serverless at re:Invent, telling attendees it "automatically scales up when database busy, down when it's not, shuts down when not in use at all."

Aurora is the fastest-growing service in AWS history, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told investors in an April earnings call.

The serverless computing paradigm, implemented through the AWS Lambda service, is also rapidly gaining steam for certain types of workloads.

Aurora is also PostgreSQL-compatible, though the current release tackles the MySQL version.

The relational database brings together the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.