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Comment by oh_hello | Hacker News Reader

The idea is exciting, but the pricing looks too high for side projects. The docs state "Aurora Serverless can scale from a minimum of 1 ACU to a maximum of 256 ACUs." Unless I'm reading this incorrectly, you are paying for 1 ACU 24 hours a day.

$0.06 * 24 * 365 = $525.60 per year.

This is more expensive than a low-end RDS instance. It's a shame, I immediately thought this would be the perfect solution for side projects and prototypes, but the pricing killed it.

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You pay per second of usage and the ACU starts and shuts down automatically. If your DB is only actually accessed a occasionally then you are not paying for 24hrs of usage. I think the auto-scaling is the draw though, not necessarily the price. So you are only getting charged the the database is being accessed. I think the examples on the pricing page make it a little more clear.

Would be strange if it was otherwise.

The whole serverless stuff only pays if you have highly varying loads OR want to save of Ops staff.

FaunaDB Serverless Cloud has global ACID transactions with per-request pricing. You can optimize your queries for cost by looking at the response headers, or support your organization with an on-premise multitenant cluster. Learn more about pricing and features here https://fauna.com/serverless

Although not applicable for all use cases, you can use static storage as an alternative for radical cost savings:

https://github.com/Miserlou/NoDB

https://github.com/Miserlou/zappa-django-utils#using-an-s3-b...

On the other hand, for the next step up, e.g. small production services with spiky workloads, it looks great, assuming I've read the product details correctly.

Case in point, I have one service that doesn't usually need a lot of DB grunt, but has occasionally spiky and unpredictable read-heavy data extractions. It runs happily on a multi-AZ pair of db.t2.small instances, for which we currently pay $0.104/hr (ap-southeast-2). Frankly it could mostly run on a db.t2.micro but we occasionally need the headroom of the bigger instance and the availability of multi-AZ. So when Serverless Aurora comes here it'd be a shoo-in, being both cheaper and more scaleable, and with more replicas to boot.

https://serverless.com/blog/ultimate-list-serverless-announc...

Here they write pay per second.

I was about to say you don't get encryption at rest with a low-end instance, but that looks like it's no longer the case since this summer.

Supposedly it turns off when you're not using it, so you'd need a small, consistent load all year to reach that price. And if that's the case, you'd just use a low-end RDS instance.

I think the value is in that you can build something quickly with no static instance cost that scales. You can (presumably) switch to normal instance-based RDS when your usage favors its pricing.

Yes, if it's not used, you don't pay.

So just a question of pricing your service on your end...

The whole point is that it's not on 24/7 so that calculation doesnt apply. If you need it always on or don't have super spiky workloads, stick with the standard instances.

https://youtu.be/k9M7QinznHc?t=22m54s

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