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Comment by zippergz | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone been able to find specific pricing on this? All of the language I've seen about it has been vague. One of the things that's kept me from using RDS for toy projects is that it basically amounts to running another instance on top of what I already have. For a "real" project, that's a drop in the bucket, but for toys and prototypes, it can be a significant chunk of the cost (so I usually end up just running my own db on the same instance as the web server for those projects).

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Pricing is at http://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/

The cheapest is a db.r3.large for $0.29 / hr

Ouch. Thanks.

Reserved pricing knocks that down a significant amount if you decide to stick with this.

Just slightly more expensive than the same instance with MySQL on RDS ($0.24)

Yes but "Storage is automatically replicated across three AWS Availability Zones (AZs) for durability and high availability, with two copies of the data in each Availability Zone."

Is that included in the server cost? Or will you actually be paying ~3x the server + storage costs?

Good question.

"Storage consumed by your database, up to 64 TB, is billed at $0.10 a GB per month and IOs consumed by your database are billed at $0.20 per million requests"

Sounds like the replication is included in this, but Amazon really should clarify that.

Based on how Amazon's pricing tables are, it should be included.

If you go to the normal RDS pricing, there's "Single AZ" and "Multi AZ" pricing. The Multi is 2x Single because it transparently runs the 2nd instance. http://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/

The pricing needs to be more clear. For example we run MYSQL RDS in production with two AZ enabled, we pay x2 the prices.... so if its only costs a bit more than MYSQL RDS and you get 3 AZ for the same price -- this is good. Moreover, there are costs that come with storage (database size), this thing seems to be smart about being more efficient with allocating space.

As i understood this your database storage is replicated to multiple places, but it still runs on one instance. It does not have failover to those replicated places. You'll have to launch multiple instances for that just like RDS. So cheaper, no.

Right, but you can also get much smaller MySQL instances. It's not necessarily an "ouch" given the capacity, but it is in combination with the fact that there are no smaller instance types.

If you need a smaller instance you are probably fine with regular MySQL instance though.

20% is "just slightly" more expensive?

For the claimed 5x performance and 6 way replication, it seems pretty cheap.

I'd think for most toy projects, running more than an EC2 instance or two is overkill. At least in my experiences, running the full stack on a single server works well enough for most hobby projects.

I certainly don't want to spend $7 a day playing around with RDS for fun!

Definitely. But one of the nice things about a lot of the AWS stuff is that you can build on the same infrastructure you'd use if you wanted to scale up. So if you have a toy project that ends up being more successful than you expect, it's pretty easy to just add resources. For example, DynamoDB is ultra cheap for the lowest usage levels, but simply by reserving more capacity you can scale up with absolutely no changes to your app. Makes it easy to prototype or play on the real system and not have to re-do your work later if the project becomes more than a toy.

I guess since this is MySQL-compatible it wouldn't be that hard to migrate from MySQL to Aurora, other than moving the data...

> other than moving the data

Moving data from one instance of MySQL to another is usually straightforward as a one-liner, piping a SQL dump from the old database into the new one over the network...

    mysqldump -hOldHost | mysql -hNewHost

...and waiting.

During the keynote they said that Aurora starts at $0.29 per hour (that's about $200 per month).

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