New configuration for Amazon Aurora provides improved price performance and predictable pricing for I/O-intensive applications

Ancestry, Edison, NetScaler, Razorpay, and Verafin are among customers using Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized, a new configuration for Amazon Aurora that offers improved price performance and predictable pricing for customers with input/output (I/O)-intensive applications. With the new Aurora configuration, customers only pay for their database instances and storage consumption with no charges for I/O operations. Customers can now confidently predict costs for their most I/O-intensive workloads, regardless of I/O variability, helping to accelerate their decision to migrate more of their database workloads to AWS. Today, hundreds of thousands of customers, including Airbnb, Atlassian, and Samsung, rely on Aurora, a fully managed MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database that provides the performance and availability of commercial databases at up to one-tenth the cost. For customers with I/O-intensive applications like payment processing systems, ecommerce, and financial applications, I/O-Optimized offers improved performance, increasing throughput and reducing latency to support customers’ most demanding workloads. With Aurora I/O-Optimized, customers can maximize the value of their cloud investment and optimize their database spend by choosing the Aurora configuration that best matches their I/O consumption patterns. To get started with Aurora I/O-Optimized, visit aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing.

Organizations of all sizes and across all industries are looking to optimize their IT spend and maximize the value of their cloud investment, so they can continue to break free of their legacy databases. Historically, customers have had to choose between performance and price when evaluating database solutions. Commercial databases offer high performance and advanced availability features, but are expensive, complex to manage, have high lock-in, and come with punitive licensing terms. Other database options require less capital expense, but customers often find those cannot achieve the performance or availability of commercial databases. Amazon Aurora gives customers the right tool for the job, so that they can optimize for performance, scale, and costs when designing applications. Aurora provides simple, pay-per-request pricing based on I/O usage, so customers do not need to provision I/Os in advance. While most customers benefit from the cost-effectiveness of this pricing, the needs of individual businesses can vary widely based on sudden changes in database queries and I/O consumption from spikes in customer demand, leading to price variability. For example, the I/Os on a database powering an ecommerce application may spike based on seasonality, creating variability that makes it challenging to predict I/O needs. Alternatively, some database offerings provide a fixed price for compute, storage, and I/O, but customers must still provision I/Os in advance. Customers want cost predictability without having to provision I/Os in advance.

Now, customers can choose between two Amazon Aurora configurations: Aurora Standard or Aurora I/O-Optimized. For applications with low-to-moderate I/O operations that represent less than 25% of the customer’s Aurora database spend, the Standard configuration of the service continues to offer customers a cost-effective option with high performance and availability at global scale. For customers with high I/O variability or I/O-intensive applications, Aurora I/O-Optimized provides improved price performance and predictable pricing. I/O-Optimized streamlines I/O processing by using smaller, more frequent batches, which reduces latency and improves throughput. Using I/O-Optimized, customers are not charged for individual read and write I/O operations, but instead, pay a set price for their database instances and storage. This allows customers to easily predict their database spend upfront, regardless of the I/O variability of their applications. Neither configuration requires upfront I/O provisioning, and both can scale I/Os to support a customer’s most demanding applications.

“We launched Amazon Aurora with the aim of providing customers with a relational database, built for the cloud, that offered the performance and availability of commercial databases at up to one-tenth the cost. Since then, we have continued innovating to improve performance while offering customers simplicity and flexibility with solutions like Amazon Aurora Serverless v2,” said Rahul Pathak, vice president of Relational Database Engines at AWS. “Now, with Aurora I/O-Optimized, we’re giving customers great value for their high-scale I/O-intensive applications, and an even better option for customers looking to migrate their most demanding workloads to Aurora and the cloud.”

Customers can launch a new cluster with Aurora I/O-Optimized, or convert an existing cluster, and easily switch between Aurora I/O-Optimized and Aurora Standard pay-per-request configurations in the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or via an AWS software development kit (SDK). For improved price performance, customers can take advantage of Aurora I/O-Optimized using existing Reserved Instances. Customers can also deploy either Aurora configuration using new Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) R7g instances, powered by AWS Graviton3 processors, with up to 20% price performance improvement. Aurora I/O-Optimized is generally available today for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition in most AWS Regions, with availability in Mainland China (Beijing), Mainland China (Ningxia), AWS GovCloud (US-East), and AWS GovCloud (US-West) Regions coming soon.

Ancestry is a global leader in family history with more than 3 million subscribers around the world. "Ancestry hosts more than 40 billion family history records and maintains the largest consumer DNA network in the world, with more than 23 million customer DNA samples. It’s a lot of data, and some of our I/O workloads can be highly variable,” said Cary Hoddy, vice president of Cloud Operations at Ancestry. “We use Amazon Aurora to process this data because it provides low-latency transaction processing and the ability to scale storage and I/O seamlessly to match the growing needs of our business. With Aurora I/O-Optimized, we can more accurately predict our database spend, allowing us to invest in our customer experience, benefiting our subscribers.”

Edison is the oldest energy company in Europe, operating 200 plants and providing 1.6 million consumers with electricity and gas. “At Edison, we use Amazon Aurora extensively because of its reliability, performance, and features,” said Federico Morreale, head of Enterprise Architecture and Data Platform at Edison. "With Aurora I/O-Optimized, we can pay a fixed price for database instances and storage, with no additional charges for read and write I/O operations. This will help us improve our price predictability, regardless of spikes in our I/O-intensive applications. We are excited that AWS could learn from Edison’s feedback to launch this new feature.”

The NetScaler (formerly part of Citrix) business unit in Cloud Software Group radically simplifies application delivery and security in hybrid multi-cloud deployments. “We use Amazon Aurora as a relational database for the NetScaler application delivery management platform, which enables automation, orchestration, management, and analytics for application delivery across hybrid multi-cloud environments. We gather a lot of application, network, and endpoint data to help customers derive insights and ensure timely application monitoring and infrastructure performance, which is write-heavy and results in variable I/O charges,” said Raghu Goyal, director of Engineering for Cloud Services and Analytics at NetScaler. “With Aurora I/O-Optimized, we will have a predictable Aurora bill with unlimited read and write I/O capacity. By minimizing the variability of our database costs with Aurora I/O-Optimized, we can more confidently plan future spend focused on providing enhanced analytical capabilities to our end-customers using artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

Razorpay is a payments solution provider in India that allows businesses to accept, process, and disburse payments with its product suite. “We use Amazon Aurora because of its security, performance, and ability to scale compute, storage, and I/O to meet the growing needs of our I/O-intensive payments processing system," said Murali Brahmadesam, chief technology officer and head of Engineering at Razorpay. “We’re encouraged by our early testing of Aurora I/O-Optimized that demonstrates increased throughput, lower latencies, cost savings, and price-performance gains, and we’re considering switching our entire Aurora fleet to use Aurora I/O-Optimized.”

Verafin, a Nasdaq company, is an industry leader in anti-financial crime management that provides innovative solutions to fight crimes such as human trafficking, terrorist financing, and elder abuse. "We leverage Amazon Aurora and other database systems to provide fraud detection, compliance, and high-risk customer management services and are impressed with Aurora’s ability to handle our most demanding workloads," said Chris Stuckless, director of Cloud at Verafin. "We are excited that Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized will ensure predictable costs for all our customers, despite highly variable workloads. With the introduction of Aurora I/O-Optimized, we are planning to migrate all our customers to Aurora this year to simplify our database management load and better focus our resources on supporting our customers’ evolving needs.”

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