Cloud computing leader Amazon Web Services Inc. Thursday said its Amazon Aurora Serverless database is now generally available after launching in beta test last November at its AWS re:Invent conference.

The company said Amazon Aurora Serverless is essentially just a new deployment option for its popular MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database Amazon Aurora. The new deployment option offers a number of important benefits, however, giving users more control by providing the option to create instances of the database only when they’re needed.

These instances can be scaled up and down on demand, while the “serverless” aspect means they don’t have to worry about provisioning the infrastructure they run on. In a release, AWS said Amazon Aurora Serverless is targeted at users with applications that have less predictable usage patterns and is priced on a per-second basis.

The company said many of its customers have applications that run on cyclical or intermittent usage patterns that can benefit from Aurora Serverless. One of the obvious use cases is development and test workloads, which may only need access to a database for a few hours per week.

Newly introduced applications also face uncertain usage demands, and that creates headaches for customers unsure of the capacity they will need. Previously these customers have had to choose between overprovisioning database capacity upfront and potentially paying for more resources than they need, or underprovisioning capacity and risking problems with performance.

Amazon Aurora Serverless removes those headaches as capacity no longer needs to be provisioned in advance. Instead, the database just fires up when needed and winds down the second it’s no longer required.

AWS rolled out a long list of customers it says have benefited from Amazon Aurora Serverless, including the Japanese mobile communications firm NTT Docomo Inc., information technology consulting firm Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. and California Polytechnic State University.

The company said Amazon Aurora Serverless is available now in its U.S. East (N. Virginia), U.S. East (Ohio), U.S. West (Oregon), EU (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.

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