
Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility Supports Serverless - kesor
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/07/amazon-aurora-with-postgresql-compatibility-supports-serverless/
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mattgibson
For clarity, there is a significant warm up time for the DB to load your data
when you cold-start, so this is sadly not suitable for use with serverless
lambda functions in a web request cycle.

A good use case for this would be batch processing on demand e.g. a background
job that's infrequently run when records are uploaded somehow. You save the
cost of keeping a big DB running in between jobs and the start up time doesn't
matter.

~~~
sudhirj
Also note that you don’t necessarily have to scale down all the way to zero.
Also works for workloads that are very spiky, like breaking news or weekend or
work hours heavy loads.

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jjeaff
If pricing is similar to other serverless offerings at AWS, then it will cost
much more to run it constantly at low rates than to just run a small instance
all the time. But maybe the much faster scale up would be desirable in some
cases.

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BenoitP
AWS RDS for PostgresSQL supports many popular extensions [1]. I wonder if
these are activated here or will be in time. One of pg's unfair advantage is
its ecosystem.

I have user-triggered batch processing jobs that need PostGIS; Aurora
Serverless for pg would be a great fit.

[1]
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/fr_fr/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/fr_fr/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_PostgreSQL.html#PostgreSQL.Concepts.General.FeatureSupport.Extensions)

~~~
nmussy
I haven't had a chance to try it out myself yet, but the Aurora FAQ[0] seems
confirm your wish:

 _Aurora database engine is designed to be wire-compatible with PostgreSQL 9.6
and 10, and supports the same set of PostgreSQL extensions that are supported
with RDS for PostgreSQL 9.6 and 10_

For reference, full list of PostgeSQL RDS extensions in the documentation[1]

[0]
[https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/faqs/](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/faqs/)
[1]
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_PostgreSQL.html#PostgreSQL.Concepts.General.FeatureSupport.Extensions)

~~~
BenoitP
Oh, that's great!

Thanks

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jjeaff
Although I know AWS is not optimizing for this use case, I see a lot of
potential with serverless databases for things like open source, home brew
style applications where people want to own and control their data but don't
want to pay for a monthly service.

IoT devices could communicate asynchronously and store important data using
just llamdba functions and serverless db instances.

The first thought that came to mind was something like the bitwarden open
source server. Currently, you can run a nano instance in the cloud that stays
on forever but it needs to be maintained and it might go down occasionally.
Additionally, it will cost you a few bucks a month assuming you need more than
the single nano allowed by the free tier.

With serverless functions and a serverless database you could have a central
store without needing to run a full server. Cold startup wouldn't be an issue
since you only need to sync to the server occasionally.

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sudhirj
This is on HN like just now
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20398353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20398353)

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unixhero
Aurora with Postgres is amazing. I don't know if I want to go back to Redshift
after using it. Pair it with a nice instance of PGADMIN4 and enjoy.

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sk5t
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or if your tastes in software are
extremely distinct from mine and most--comparing Aurora to Redshift? Pgadmin4,
really??

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fabioyy
I've cut costs by an order of magnitude by changing back to old school
dedicated servers. ( using the same data center that aws/google uses, equinix
) IOPS on aws is ridiculous expensive

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redis_mlc
1) AWS and GCP have their own datacenters with their own custom switches and
routers, etc.

2) Sure, as a DBA, I prefer dedicated servers with SSD. If you don't have a
DBA, then RDS/Aurora are ok too.

For production, ensure you have a replica either way. MySQL 8 has multi-master
now (or use Percona Server/Galera), so you can easily enable HA, and I'm sure
Postgres does too.

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quantguy11959
How well would this work with something like airflow ? If I have jobs that run
only end of day for an hour on airflow, I pay just for an hour of the database
?

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habitue
Depends on how you've configured airflow. It polls its dag directory
constantly, and may do some db queries for each poll (don't quote me on this,
I definitely don't know everything about the internals of airflow). From what
I remember you can reduce the polling period in config

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quantguy11959
Yeah I’ll need to do some research, if I can only poll the db for just the
time I need this will be a huge cost saving for me. I think the db only gets
queried if a dag actually runs but I’m not 100% sure.

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jakozaur
Has anybody here used Amazona Aurora serverless?

Is it a viable alternative for big RDS instances?

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nh_99
A company that I work for was in the beta of serverless for MySQL, and we
currently use it for both dev and production workloads. We're a startup, so it
definitely simplifies devops for us, but personally I think you're better off
just running a large RDS instance.

The main problem with it that we have run into is that if there are active
transactions in the database, it can't find a "scale point". So when our
application gets hit with thousands of users at a time and they are all
generating database transactions, it can't scale up.

It's definitely been good for us in development though, and I would highly
recommend it for that.

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davidjnelson
They do allow you to drop connections with forced scale points if that's a
tradeoff your application can make [https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2019/04/amazon_au...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2019/04/amazon_aurora_serverless_now_supports_a_minimum_capacity_of_1_unit_and_a_new_scaling_option/)

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ralusek
Is this still capped at data of 64TB?

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iamed2
Smaller, 32 TiB.

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/CHAP_Limits.html#RDS_Limits.FileSize.Aurora)

