Posted On: May 11, 2023

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized, a new configuration that provides improved price performance and predictable pricing for customers with I/O-intensive applications. Aurora I/O-Optimized offers improved performance, increasing throughput and reducing latency for customers’ most demanding workloads. With Aurora I/O-Optimized, there are zero charges for read and write I/O operations—you only pay for your database instances and storage usage, making it easy to predict your database spend up front. Aurora I/O-Optimized offers up to 40% cost savings for I/O-intensive applications where I/O charges exceed 25% of the total Aurora database spend.

You can now choose between two configurations: Aurora Standard or Aurora I/O-Optimized. For applications with low-to-moderate I/Os, Aurora Standard is a cost-effective option. For applications with high I/Os, Aurora I/O-Optimized provides improved price performance, predictable pricing, and up to 40% costs savings. You can switch your cluster with a single click in the AWS Management Console or with a command through the AWS Command Line Interface. Aurora I/O-Optimized configuration is supported on Aurora Serverless v2 and provisioned instances, both on demand and reserved including existing Aurora reserved instances. You can switch existing database clusters to Aurora I/O-Optimized once every 30 days and switch back to Aurora Standard at any time.

Aurora I/O-Optimized is supported on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) T3, T4g, R5, R6i, R6g, X2g, and the recently launched R7g instances. R7g instances are powered by the latest generation AWS Graviton3 processors, delivering up to 30% performance gains and up to 20% improved price performance for Aurora, as compared to Graviton2 R6g instances. Aurora I/O-Optimized is available for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition in most AWS Regions where Aurora is available.

To learn more, visit the Aurora Pricing page or Aurora storage and reliability in the Aurora User Guide. To get started, visit the AWS Management Console.

May 12, 2023: Updated to specify supported instances for Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized.