UPDATED 17:02 EDT / MAY 12 2023

CLOUD

AWS launches Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized to lower users’ database costs

Amazon Web Services Inc. has introduced a new version of its Amazon Aurora managed database service that promises to reduce cloud costs for customers.

The offering, called Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized, made its debut on Thursday. It’s expected to provide cost savings of up to 40% for some workloads.

“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,” said Rahul Pathak, vice president of relational database engines at AWS.

Aurora is a managed relational database that companies can use without having to maintain the underlying infrastructure. It’s compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, two other popular relational databases. That means companies can switch applications written for MySQL and PostgreSQL to Aurora without making major code changes.

AWS released the initial version of Aurora in 2014. The service has since been adopted by hundreds of thousands of customers, including many Fortune 500 companies.

Aurora I/O-Optimized, the new version of the service, is geared toward applications that perform a large number of data input and output operations. Such operations are usually referred to simply as I/O.

The standard version of Aurora is billed based on the number and type of compute instances on which customers deploy the database, as well as the amount of storage capacity they use. Additionally, customers pay a fee for each I/O operation that their applications make.

The new Aurora I/O-Optimized edition of the database has a different pricing model. Like the standard version, it’s billed based on the number and type of compute instances customers use as well as the associated storage consumption. However, users are not billed for I/O operations, which allows I/O-intensive applications to run at a lower cost.

AWS says the savings the offering provides can be significant. If I/O operations account for more than a quarter of the database bill associated with an application, Aurora I/O-Optimized promises to reduce costs by up to 40%.

The offering can also make it easier for customers to anticipate cloud expenses. When a database is billed per I/O operation, an unexpected increase in applications’ input and output requests can potentially lead to cost overruns. By removing charges associated with input and output operations, Aurora I/O-Optimized mitigates that risk.

Companies can further reduce costs by running Aurora I/O-Optimized on Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. Those are instances that provide lower pricing than standard virtual machines in exchange for a long-term usage commitment.

According to AWS, companies can not only use Aurora I/O-Optimized to power new relational database clusters but also enable it for existing deployments. Customers may switch an existing deployment to Aurora I/O-Optimized once every 30 days. The task doesn’t require administrators to reboot database instances, which helps avoid downtime. 

Image: AWS

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