Category: Amazon Aurora

The unit of measure for Aurora Serverless v2 is the Aurora capacity unit (ACU). Each workload has unique minimum and maximum ACU requirements. Finding the right ACU configuration and understanding factors influencing Aurora Serverless v2 scaling is essential. This post is Part 1 of a two-part blog post series and focuses on understanding how certain database parameters impact Aurora Serverless v2 scaling behavior for PostgreSQL-compatible DB instances. This post considers minimum ACU to be 0.5 or higher and does not include the new automatic pause feature.

April, 2026: Aurora Serverless v2 has been renamed Aurora serverless. No action required. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 now supports scaling capacity down to 0 ACUs, enabling you to optimize costs during periods of database inactivity. Aurora Serverless is an on-demand, auto scaling configuration of Aurora that automatically adjusts your database capacity based on your workload requirements. Aurora […]

Aurora Limitless is a database solution that grows and shrinks vertically and horizontally with the current workload requirements. In this post, we show you how to test performance with the common tool pgbench. This tool is used with single-node database management systems (DBMS) and is optimized for single-node use cases. As we shall see in this post, this doesn’t mean that the tool measure what we think when it comes to multi-node systems. We demonstrate how it works with Aurora Limitless. We also discuss the obstacles and opportunities you might encounter when using this tool with Aurora Limitless.

August 2025: This post was reviewed and updated for accuracy. PostgreSQL’s ability to handle concurrent access while maintaining data consistency relies heavily on its locking mechanisms, particularly at the row level. When multiple transactions attempt to lock the same row simultaneously, PostgreSQL turns to a specialized structure called MultiXact IDs. While MultiXacts provide an efficient […]

When clients start running queries on new Amazon Aurora replicas, they will notice a longer runtime for the first few times that queries are run; this is due to the cold cache of the replica. As the database runs more queries, the cache gets populated and the clients notice faster runtimes. In this post, we focus on how to address the cold cache so clients that are connecting through a load-balanced endpoint get a consistent experience regardless of whether the replicas are automatically or manually scaled. In addition, we also look at other caching solutions such as Amazon ElastiCache, a fully managed Memcached, Redis, and Valkey compatible service, that can further improve the overall experience for latency-sensitive applications and, in some situations (such as higher cache hits), lead to less frequent auto-scaling events of the Aurora read replicas.

April, 2026: Aurora Serverless v2 has been renamed Aurora serverless. No action required. pgvector is the open source PostgreSQL extension for vector similarity search that powers generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications using techniques such as semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition has supported pgvector 0.5.1 since 2023. Amazon Aurora now supports pgvector version 0.7.0, […]

In the dynamic world of digital retail, performance, resilience, and availability are not only desirable qualities, they are essential. Recently, Dafiti, a leading fashion and lifestyle ecommerce conglomerate operating in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia, undertook a significant transformation of its critical database infrastructure by migrating from self-managed MySQL Server 5.7 on Amazon EC2 to Amazon Aurora MySQL. This strategic move improved the resiliency and efficiency of its database operations. In this post, we show you why we chose Aurora MySQL-Compatible and how we migrated our critical database infrastructure.

This is the third post in a series where we dive deep into performance testing of MySQL environments being migrated from on premises. In Part 1, we compared the query playback and traffic mirroring approaches at a high level. In Part 2, we showed how to set up and configure query playback. In this post, we show you how to set up and configure traffic mirroring.

This is the second post in a series where we dive deep into performance testing MySQL environments being migrated from on premises. In Part 1, we compared the query playback and traffic mirroring approaches at a high level. In this post, we dive into the setup and configuration of query playback.

In this series of posts, we dive deep into performance testing of MySQL environments being migrated from on-premises to AWS. In this post, we review two different approaches to testing migrated environments with traffic that is representative of real production traffic: capturing and replaying traffic using a playback application, and mirroring traffic as it comes in using a proxy. This means you’re validating your environment using realistic data access patterns.