Cost-effective
Pay only for what you use
Aurora requires no upfront commitment. You pay an hourly charge for each instance that you launch, and when
you're finished with an Aurora DB instance, you can delete it. You do not need to overprovision storage as a
safety margin, and you only pay for the storage you actually consume. Additional information is available on
the Aurora pricing
AWS Free Tier
New AWS customers can get started with Aurora PostgreSQL serverless at no cost through the AWS Free
Tier
The Free plan gives you access to Aurora PostgreSQL serverless instances with up to 4 ACUs and 1 GiB of
storage per cluster. You can upgrade to the Paid plan at any time to scale up to 256 ACUs and 256 TiB of
storage. You can also access Aurora PostgreSQL serverless directly through the Vercel Marketplace
Price predictability
Aurora offers the flexibility to optimize your database spend by choosing between two configuration options
– Aurora I/O-Optimized and Aurora Standard – based on your price-performance and price-predictability needs,
regardless of the I/O consumption of your application. Neither option requires upfront I/O or storage
provisioning and both can scale I/O to support your most demanding applications. You can switch between
configurations using the RDS Management Console
Optimize I/O costs
Aurora was designed to eliminate unnecessary I/O operations to reduce costs and ensure resources are available for serving read/write traffic. Every database page read operation counts as one I/O (8 KB in Aurora PostgreSQL and 16 KB in Aurora MySQL). Write I/O operations are counted in 4 KB units and are only consumed when pushing transaction log records to the storage layer for the purpose of making writes durable. For example, a transaction log record that is 1,024 bytes counts as one I/O operation. However, concurrent write operations whose transaction log is less than 4 KB can be batched together by the Aurora database engine to optimize I/O consumption. Unlike traditional database engines, Aurora never pushes modified database pages to the storage layer, resulting in further I/O consumption savings.
You can monitor how many I/O operations your Aurora instance is using "Billed read operations" and "Billed
write operations" metrics in the monitoring section of the RDS Management Console
You are charged for read and write I/O operations when you configure your database clusters to the Aurora
Standard configuration. You are not charged for read and write I/O operations when you configure your database
clusters to Aurora I/O-Optimized. Additional information on the pricing of I/O operations is available on
Aurora pricing
Optimized reads
With optimized reads for Aurora PostgreSQL, you have more flexibility to grow your datasets without the need to frequently upsize their database instances to obtain larger memory capacity. Optimized reads deliver up to 8x improved query latency and up to 30% cost savings for latency-sensitive applications with large working sets, using performance enhancements such as tiered caching and temporary objects.
Tiered caching delivers up to 8x improved query latency and up to 30% cost savings for read-heavy, I/O-intensive applications such as operational dashboards, anomaly detection, and vector-based similarity searches. These benefits are realized as caching data is automatically evicted from the in-memory database buffer cache onto local storage to speed up subsequent access of that data. In addition, temporary objects achieve faster query processing by placing temporary tables generated by Aurora PostgreSQL on local storage, improving the performance of queries involving sorts, hash aggregations, high-load joins, and other data-intensive operations.
