Amazon Aurora Serverless is getting a major update. This component of Amazon Aurora’s relational database engine, Amazon Web Services (AWS), regularly calls its fastest-growing product.
AWS announced Tuesday that Aurora Serverless Version 2 (v2) has been released to preview during its 2020 reInvent virtual conference. Sign up here to access the preview. The preview is only available for Amazon Aurora deployments that are MySQL-compatible.
Aurora Serverless allows users of Amazon Aurora to scale their database capacity in a hands-off manner. It adjusts capacity automatically as needed, which is useful for applications with irregular, unpredictable, or infrequent traffic patterns. Auto-scaling allows organizations to avoid over-spending or running out of capacity, which can lead to application downtime.
Aurora Serverless v1 simply doubles the capacity whenever it is needed to scale up. This process takes between five and 50 seconds. AWS claims that v2 can now “scale database workloads to hundreds or thousands of transactions in a fraction”
With v2, the amount of capacity added is also more nuanced. v2 does more than double capacity as-needed. It expands capacity “in finely-grained increments to provide just enough database resources for an app’s needs.”
AWS says that Aurora Serverless is already in use by thousands of customers. With v2, Aurora Serverless will be able to support a wider range of workloads. AWS stated that Amazon Aurora Serverless is now able to support large enterprises with hundreds of thousands of applications that need to manage their database capacity across the entire fleet. This also applies to Software as a Service (SaaS), vendors that have multi-tenant environments that support hundreds or thousands of databases.
AWS also announced another Amazon Aurora news: Aurora PostgreSQL will be able to run workloads that have been directly migrated from Microsoft SQL Server without any manual coding.
AWS explained that the feature, called Babelfish, “understands T–SQL (Microsoft SQL Server’s proprietary SQL dialect), so customers don’t have to rewrite every application’s database requests,” AWS explained.
Babelfish is now available for preview. Sign up here.
AWS plans to open source Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL under the Apache 2.0 license in 2021. This move is for organizations that wish to completely move away from SQL Server and its steward Microsoft’s licensing practices, which AWS described as “aggressive, manipulative” in its announcement.
