Aurora Serverless in v3

JayJanuary 5, 2025

We are adding Aurora, a new component for Amazon Aurora Serverless v2. Recently, AWS announced that Aurora Serverless v2 can scale to 0 and auto-pause. This is good for dev or PR stages.

There are some differences between this and the Postgres RDS component. We talk about it here in this video.

Getting started

To get started, you can add the Aurora component to your app.

const vpc = new sst.aws.Vpc("MyVpc");

const database = new sst.aws.Aurora("MyDatabase", {
  engine: "postgres",
  vpc
});

Scaling

By default, this has a min of 0 ACUs and a max of 4 ACUs.

An ACU or Aurora Capacity Unit is roughly equivalent to 2 GB of memory. So pick the minimum and maximum based on the baseline and peak memory usage of your app.

new sst.aws.Aurora("MyDatabase", {
  engine: "postgres",
  scaling: {
    min: "2 ACU",
    max: "128 ACU"
  },
  vpc
});

If you set a min of 0 ACUs, the database will be paused when there are no active connections in the pauseAfter specified time period.

Dev mode

Aside from scaling to 0, you can also configure the Aurora component to not deploy the database in sst dev. Instead it can link to your locally running database, if you enable the dev prop.

new sst.aws.Aurora("MyDatabase", {
  engine: "postgres",
  dev: {
    username: "postgres",
    password: "password",
    database: "local",
    host: "localhost",
    port: 5432
  },
  vpc
});

Cost

Each ACU costs $0.12 per hour for both postgres and mysql engine. The storage costs $0.01 per GB per month for standard storage.

So if your database is constantly using 1GB of memory or 0.5 ACUs, then you are charged $0.12 x 0.5 x 24 x 30 or $43 per month. And add the storage costs to this as well.

If your database scales to 0 ACUs and is auto-paused, you are not charged for the ACUs.

Read more about the cost of using Aurora.

Examples

We also have a few examples that you can check out.