Business

With the new Aurora configuration, customers only pay for their database instances and storage consumption with no charges for I/O operations. Customers can now confidently predict costs for their most I/O-intensive workloads, regardless of I/O variability, helping to accelerate their decision to migrate more of their database workloads to AWS.

Today, hundreds of thousands of customers, including Airbnb, Atlassian, and Samsung, rely on Aurora, a fully managed MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database that provides the performance and availability of commercial databases at up to one-tenth the cost. For customers with I/O-intensive applications like payment processing systems, e-commerce, and financial applications, I/O-Optimized offers improved performance, increasing throughput and reducing latency to support customers’ most demanding workloads.

With Aurora I/O-Optimized, customers can maximise the value of their cloud investment and optimise their database spend by choosing the Aurora configuration that best matches their I/O consumption patterns.

Organisations of all sizes and across all industries are looking to optimise their IT spend and maximise the value of their cloud investment, so they can continue to break free of their legacy databases. Historically, customers have had to choose between performance and price when evaluating database solutions. Commercial databases offer high performance and advanced availability features, but are expensive, complex to manage, have high lock-in, and come with punitive licensing terms. Other database options require less capital expense, but customers often find those cannot achieve the performance or availability of commercial databases. Amazon Aurora gives customers the right tool for the job, so that they can optimise for performance, scale, and costs when designing applications. Aurora provides simple, pay-per-request pricing based on I/O usage, so customers do not need to provision I/Os in advance.

While most customers benefit from the cost-effectiveness of this pricing, the needs of individual businesses can vary widely based on sudden changes in database queries and I/O consumption from spikes in customer demand, leading to price variability. For example, the I/Os on a database powering an e-commerce application may spike based on seasonality, creating variability that makes it challenging to predict I/O needs. Alternatively, some database offerings provide a fixed price for compute, storage, and I/O, but customers must still provision I/Os in advance. Customers want cost predictability without having to provision I/Os in advance.

Now, customers can choose between two Amazon Aurora configurations: Aurora Standard or Aurora I/O-Optimized. For applications with low-to-moderate I/O operations that represent less than 25% of the customer’s Aurora database spend, the Standard configuration of the service continues to offer customers a cost-effective option with high performance and availability at global scale. For customers with high I/O variability or I/O-intensive applications, Aurora I/O-Optimized provides improved price performance and predictable pricing. I/O-Optimized streamlines I/O processing by using smaller, more frequent batches, which reduces latency and improves throughput.

Using I/O-Optimized, customers are not charged for individual read and write I/O operations, but instead, pay a set price for their database instances and storage. This allows customers to easily predict their database spend upfront, regardless of the I/O variability of their applications. Neither configuration requires upfront I/O provisioning, and both can scale I/Os to support a customer’s most demanding applications.

“We launched Amazon Aurora with the aim of providing customers with a relational database, built for the cloud, that offered the performance and availability of commercial databases at up to one-tenth the cost. Since then, we have continued innovating to improve performance while offering customers simplicity and flexibility with solutions like Amazon Aurora Serverless v2,” said Rahul Pathak, vice president of Relational Database Engines at AWS. “Now, with Aurora I/O-Optimized, we’re giving customers great value for their high-scale I/O-intensive applications, and an even better option for customers looking to migrate their most demanding workloads to Aurora and the cloud.”

Customers can launch a new cluster with Aurora I/O-Optimized, or convert an existing cluster, and easily switch between Aurora I/O-Optimized and Aurora Standard pay-per-request configurations in the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or via an AWS software development kit (SDK). For improved price performance, customers can take advantage of Aurora I/O-Optimized using existing Reserved Instances. Customers can also deploy either Aurora configuration using new Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) R7g instances, powered by AWS Graviton3 processors, with up to 20% price performance improvement.

Aurora I/O-Optimized is generally available today for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition in most AWS Regions, with availability in Mainland China (Beijing), Mainland China (Ningxia), AWS GovCloud (US-East), and AWS GovCloud (US-West) Regions coming soon.