Amazon Aurora is a modern relational database service that offers performance and high availability at scale, fully open-source MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions, and a range of developer tools for building serverless and machine learning-driven applications. 

For provisioned Aurora, you can choose On-Demand Instances and pay for your database by the hour with no long-term commitments or upfront fees, or choose Reserved Instances for additional savings. Alternatively, Aurora Serverless automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales capacity up or down based on your application's needs and you pay only for capacity consumed. 

Aurora storage is billed in per GB-month increments, while I/Os consumed are billed in per million request increments. You do not need to provision either storage or I/Os in advance. Both scale automatically and you pay only for the storage and I/Os your Amazon Aurora database consumes. 

Additional charges apply for specific features including Global Database, Backtrack, and Snapshot Export, as well as for data transfer out of Aurora. The prices below apply to both the MySQL- compatible and the PostgreSQL-compatible editions of Amazon Aurora, except where noted.

Database Instances

Select "Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition" or "Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition" to view database instance pricing.

    • Serverless
    • Amazon Aurora Serverless is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration that automatically adjusts database capacity based on application needs. With Aurora Serverless, you only pay for the database capacity, storage, and I/O your database consumes when it is active. Your database capacity automatically scales up or down to meet your application workload needs and shuts down during periods of inactivity, saving you money and administration time. Aurora Serverless measures database capacity in Aurora Capacity Units (ACUs) billed per second. 1 ACU has approximately 2 GiB of memory with corresponding CPU and networking, similar to what is used in Aurora provisioned instances.

      Aurora Serverless v2

      Aurora Serverless v2 instantly scales databases to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per second and supports all features of Aurora, including Multi-AZ deployments, Read Replicas, Global Database, and RDS Proxy. In addition to gaining access to v2 features, most Aurora Serverless customers can lower costs by moving to v2 due to a lower starting capacity of 0.5 ACU (vs. 1 ACU in v1), capacity increments of as small as 0.5 ACU (vs. doubling in v1), and up to 15x faster scale down in capacity compared to Aurora Serverless v1. 

      For example, consider a workload that needs 5 ACUs and runs for 30 mins. With v1, the minimum capacity you can set is 1 ACU. The amount of time v1 takes to scale capacity depends on the workload. Assuming that v1 is able to double capacity every minute, the database would scale to 8 ACUs in 3 minutes. The compute cost when the database is scaling up is $0.007 ($0.06/ACU-hour x 1 ACUs x 1/60 hour + $0.06/ACU-hour x 2 ACUs x 1/60 hour + $0.06/ACU-hour x 4 ACUs x 1/60 hour). The database then runs for 30 mins at 8 ACUs. The cost is $0.24 ($0.06/ACU-hour x 8 ACUs x 30/60 hour). Finally, the database scales down from 8 ACUs to 1 ACU by halving capacity every 15 mins. The cost when the database is scaling down is $0.21 ($0.06/ACU-hour x 8 ACUs x 15/60 hour + $0.06/ACU-hour x 4 ACUs x 15/60 hour + $0.06/ACU-hour x 2 ACUs x 15/60 hour). The total cost for running the workload is $0.46 ($0.007 + $0.24 + $0.21) in US East (Ohio).

      With v2, the minimum database capacity you can set is 0.5 ACU. The database scales instantly from 0.5 ACU to 5 ACUs, runs for 30 mins and scales down to the minimum capacity of 0.5 ACU . Since v2 scales down up to 15x faster, the database goes from 5 ACUs to 0.5 ACU in approximately 3 minutes. The compute cost for running the workload is $0.33 ($0.12/ACU-hour x 5 ACUs x 30/60 hour + $0.12/ACU-hour x 5 ACU x 3/60) in US East (Ohio).

      Scale up latency

      Instant scaling to hundreds-of-thousands of transactions per second

      Scale down latency

      Up to 15X faster

      Starting capacity

      0.5 ACU

      Capacity granularity

      Fine-grained, with increments as small as 0.5 ACU

      Read Replicas

      Up to 15 Aurora Replicas for read scalability

      Multi-AZ and SLA

      Distribute read replicas in separate AZs for high availability. Refer Amazon Aurora SLA for details.

      Aurora Global Database

      Sub-Second Data Access in Any Region and Cross-Region Disaster Recovery. Refer Aurora Global Database for details.

      Aurora Serverless v1 

      Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 is a simple, cost-effective option for infrequent, intermittent, or unpredictable workloads.

      Scale up latency

      5 to 50 seconds

      Scale down latency

      Up to 15 minutes

      Starting capacity

      1 ACU

      Capacity granularity

      Doubles capacity with each increment

    • Provisioned On-Demand Instance
    • On-Demand Instances let you pay for your database (DB) by the hour with no long-term commitments or upfront fees. This frees you from the cost and complexity of planning and purchasing database capacity ahead of your needs. On-Demand pricing lets you pay as you go and is ideal for development, test, and other short-lived workloads. 

      Pricing is per DB instance-hour consumed, from the time a DB instance is launched until it is stopped or deleted. Partial DB instance-hours are billed in one-second increments with a 10-minute minimum charge following a billable status change such as creating, starting, or modifying the DB instance class. 

      Instance pricing applies to both primary instances, used for read-write workloads, and Amazon Aurora Replicas, used to scale reads and enhance failover. Amazon RDS Multi-Availability Zone (AZ) technology is used to fail over to one of your Replicas if an outage occurs. The cost of Multi-AZ deployments is simply the cost of the primary instance plus the cost of each Amazon Aurora Replica. To maximize availability, we recommend placing at least one Replica in a different Availability Zone from the primary instance.

      T4g and T3 CPU Credits

      Amazon RDS T4g and T3 DB instances run in Unlimited mode, which means that you will be charged if your average CPU utilization over a rolling 24-hour period exceeds the baseline of the instance. CPU Credits are charged at $0.09 per vCPU-Hour. The CPU Credit pricing is the same for all T4g and T3 instance sizes across all regions and is not covered by Reserved Instances.

       

    • Provisioned Reserved Instance
    • Reserved Instances are appropriate for steady-state database workloads and offer significant savings over On-Demand. One Year Reserved Instances provide discounts up to 45 percent and Three Year Reserved Instances provide discounts of up to 66 percent over On-Demand. You commit to the entire duration of the Reserved Instance term and pay an upfront charge and a discounted hourly rate as shown below. You will be billed for each hour of the term regardless of whether any usage has occurred. 

      You need to purchase a Reserved Instance for each database instance you plan to use, including Aurora Replicas. 

      Reserved Instances provide size flexibility for the Amazon Aurora database engine. With size flexibility, your Reserved Instances’ discounted rate will automatically apply to usage of any size in the same instance family (T3, R5, etc.). 

      Please note that Reserved Instance prices don't cover storage or I/O costs. To learn more about features, payment options, and rules, please visit our Amazon RDS Reserved Instances page. 

      You may designate database instances as Reserved Instances by calling the Purchasing API or selecting the Reserved Instance option in the AWS console. When you designate a database instance as a Reserved Instance, you must designate a Region, instance type, and quantity for the applicable Reserved Instances. The Reserved Instances may only be used in the designated Region. AWS may terminate the Reserved Instance pricing program at any time. In addition to being subject to Reserved Instance pricing, Reserved Instances are subject to all data transfer and other fees applicable under the AWS Customer Agreement or other agreement with us governing your use of our services.

      * This is the average monthly payment over the course of the Reserved Instance term. For each month, the actual monthly payment will equal the actual number of hours in that month multiplied by the hourly usage rate or number of seconds in that month multiplied by the hourly usage rate divided by 3600, depending on the Aurora instance type you run. The hourly usage rate is equivalent to the total average monthly payments over the term of the Reserved Instance divided by the total number of hours (based on a 365 day year) over the term of the Reserved Instance.

      ** Effective hourly pricing helps you calculate the amount of money a Reserved Instance will save you over On-Demand pricing. When you purchase a Reserved Instance, you are billed for every hour during the entire Reserved Instance term you select, regardless of whether the instance is running. The effective hourly price shows the amortized hourly instance cost. This takes the total cost of the Reserved Instance over the entire term, including any upfront payment, and spreads it out over each hour of the Reserved Instance term.

    • Serverless
    • Amazon Aurora Serverless is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration that automatically adjusts database capacity based on application needs. With Aurora Serverless, you only pay for the database capacity, storage, and I/O your database consumes when it is active. Your database capacity automatically scales up or down to meet your application workload needs and shuts down during periods of inactivity, saving you money and administration time. Aurora Serverless measures database capacity in Aurora Capacity Units (ACUs) billed per second. 1 ACU has approximately 2 GB of memory with corresponding CPU and networking, similar to what is used in Aurora provisioned instances.

      Amazon Serverless v2

      Aurora Serverless v2 instantly scales databases to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per second and supports all features of Aurora, including Multi-AZ deployments, Read Replicas, and Global Database. In addition to gaining access to v2 features, most Aurora Serverless customers can lower costs by moving to v2 due to a lower starting capacity of 0.5 ACU (vs. 2 ACUs in v1), capacity increments of as small as 0.5 ACU (vs. doubling in v1), and up to 15x faster scale down in capacity compared to Aurora Serverless v1.

      For example, consider a workload that needs 5 ACUs worth of capacity and runs for 30 mins. With v1, the minimum capacity you can set is 2 ACUs. The amount of time v1 takes to scale capacity depends on the workload. Assuming that v1 is able to double capacity every minute, the database would scale to 8 ACUs in 2 minutes. The compute cost for scaling up is $0.006 ($0.06/ACU-hour x 2 ACUs x 1/60 hour + $0.06/ACU-hour x 4 ACUs x 1/60 hour). The database then runs for 30 mins at 8 ACUs. The cost is $0.24 ($0.06/ACU-hour x 8 ACUs x 30/60 hour). Finally, the database scales down from 8 ACUs to 2 ACUs by halving capacity every 15 mins. The cost for scaling down is $0.18 ($0.06/ACU-hour x 8 ACUs x 15/60 hour + $0.06/ACU-hour x 4 ACUs x 15/60 hour). The total cost for running this workload is $0.43 ($0.006 + $0.24 + $0.18) in US East (Ohio).

      With v2, the minimum database capacity you can set is 0.5 ACU. The database scales instantly from 0.5 ACU to 5 ACUs, runs for 30 mins and scales down to the minimum capacity of 0.5 ACU . Since v2 scales down up to 15x faster, the database goes from 5 ACUs to 0.5 ACU in approximately 3 minutes. The compute cost for the workload on Aurora Serverless v2 is $0.33 ($0.12/ACU-hour x 5 ACUs x 30/60 hour + $0.12/ACU-hour x 5 ACU x 3/60) in US East (Ohio).

      Scale up latency

      Instant scaling to hundreds-of-thousands of transactions per second

      Scale down latency

      Up to 15X faster

      Starting capacity

      0.5 ACU

      Capacity granularity

      Fine-grained, with increments as small as 0.5 ACU

      Read Replicas

      Up to 15 Aurora Replicas for read scalability

      Multi-AZ and SLA

      Distribute read replicas in separate AZs for high availability. Refer Amazon Aurora SLA for details.

      Aurora Global Database

      Sub-Second Data Access in Any Region and Cross-Region Disaster Recovery. Refer Aurora Global Database for details.

      Aurora Serverless v1 Pricing

      Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 is a simple, cost-effective option for infrequent, intermittent, or unpredictable workloads.

      Scale up latency

      5 to 50 seconds

      Scale down latency

      Up to 15 minutes

      Starting capacity

      2 ACU

      Capacity granularity

      Doubles capacity with each increment

    • Provisioned On-Demand Instance
    • On-Demand Instances let you pay for your database by the hour with no long-term commitments or upfront fees. This frees you from the cost and complexity of planning and purchasing database capacity ahead of your needs. On-Demand pricing lets you pay as you go and is ideal for development, test, and other short-lived workloads. 

      Pricing is per DB instance-hour consumed, from the time a DB instance is launched until it is stopped or deleted. Partial DB instance-hours are billed in one-second increments with a 10 minute minimum charge following a billable status change such as creating, starting, or modifying the DB instance class. 

      Instance pricing applies to both Primary instances, used for read-write workloads, and any Amazon Aurora Replicas, used to scale reads and enhance failover. Amazon RDS Multi-AZ technology is used to fail over to one of your Replicas if an outage occurs. The cost of Multi-AZ deployments is simply the cost of the primary instance plus the cost of each Amazon Aurora Replica. To maximize availability, we recommend placing at least one Replica in a different Availability Zone from the primary instance.

      T4g and T3 CPU Credits

      Amazon RDS T4g and T3 DB instances run in Unlimited mode, which means that you will be charged if your average CPU utilization over a rolling 24-hour period exceeds the baseline of the instance. CPU Credits are charged at $0.09 per vCPU-Hour. The CPU Credit pricing is the same for all T4g and T3 instance sizes across all regions and is not covered by Reserved Instances.

    • Provisioned Reserved Instance
    • Reserved Instances are appropriate for steady-state database workloads and offer significant savings over On-Demand. One Year Reserved Instances provide discounts up to 45% and Three Year Reserved Instances provide discounts of up to 66% over On-Demand. You commit to the entire duration of the Reserved Instance term and pay an upfront charge and a discounted hourly rate as shown below. You will be billed for each hour of the term regardless of whether any usage has occurred. 

      You need to purchase a Reserved Instance for each database instance you plan to use, including Aurora Replicas.

      Reserved Instances provide size flexibility for the Amazon Aurora database engine. With size flexibility, your Reserved Instances’ discounted rate will automatically apply to usage of any size in the same instance family (T3, R5, etc.) 

      Please note that Reserved Instance prices don't cover storage or I/O costs. To learn more about features, payment options, and rules, please visit our Amazon RDS Reserved Instances page. 

      You may designate database instances as Reserved Instances by calling to the Purchasing API or selecting the Reserved Instance option in the AWS console. When you designate a database instance as a Reserved Instance, you must designate a Region, instance type, and quantity for the applicable Reserved Instances. The Reserved Instances may only be used in the designated Region. AWS may terminate the Reserved Instance pricing program at any time. In addition to being subject to Reserved Instance pricing, Reserved Instances are subject to all data transfer and other fees applicable under the AWS Customer Agreement or other agreement with us governing your use of our services.

      * This is the average monthly payment over the course of the Reserved Instance term. For each month, the actual monthly payment will equal the actual number of hours in that month multiplied by the hourly usage rate or number of seconds in that month multiplied by the hourly usage rate divided by 3600, depending on the Aurora instance type you run. The hourly usage rate is equivalent to the total average monthly payments over the term of the Reserved Instance divided by the total number of hours (based on a 365 day year) over the term of the Reserved Instance.

      ** Effective hourly pricing helps you calculate the amount of money a Reserved Instance will save you over On-Demand pricing. When you purchase a Reserved Instance, you are billed for every hour during the entire Reserved Instance term you select, regardless of whether the instance is running. The effective hourly price shows the amortized hourly instance cost. This takes the total cost of the Reserved Instance over the entire term, including any upfront payment, and spreads it out over each hour of the Reserved Instance term.

Database Storage and I/Os

Amazon Aurora database storage consumption is billed in per GB-month increments, and I/Os consumed are billed in per million request increments. You pay only for the storage and I/Os your Amazon Aurora database consumes and do not need to provision in advance. I/O charges may vary significantly depending on workload and database engine. To learn more, visit the Aurora FAQ, “Q: What are I/Os in Amazon Aurora and how are they calculated?”

For a simplified example, let’s assume you have an Aurora database and you start with a 1,000 GB database at the beginning of the month (30-day period) that is growing 2 percent or 20 GB daily. You are charged the pro-rated rate based on the days left in the month. So, you will be charged 1,000 GB for 30 days. The next day you will be charged for the additional 20 GB for 29 days. The next day you will be charged for the additional 20 GB for 28 days, and so on. Therefore, at the end of a 30-day period, you would have the following usage in GB-month: (1,000 GB * 30 days + 20 GB * 29 days + 20 GB * 28 days + ... + 20 GB * 1 day) / 30 days = 1,290 GB-month. Assume that the data is stored in the US East (N. Virginia) Region and the unit price is $0.10 per GB-month. Then the total cost would be 1,290 GB-month * $0.10 per GB-month = $129 (please note the difference between GB and GB-month).

For I/O charges, let’s assume the same database reads 100 data pages from storage per second to satisfy the queries running on it. This would result in 262.8 million read I/Os per month (100 pages per second x 730 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds). Similarly, let’s assume your application makes changes to the database affecting an average of 10 data pages per second. Aurora will charge one I/O operation for up to 4 KB of changes on each data page. If the volume of data changed per page is less than 4 KB, this would result in 10 write I/Os per second. This equates to 26.2 million I/Os per month (10 write I/Os per second * 730 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds).

The number of write operations can be less, subject to Aurora write I/O optimizations that can combine write operations less than 4 KB in size together under certain circumstances. Combined, your monthly maximum I/O cost for this workload will be $57.80 ($0.20 for one million requests x 289 million requests). However, if the volume of changes per data page is larger than 4 KB, Aurora will consume more than one I/O operation to persist the changes to a data page, resulting in a larger number of write I/Os to persist the data changes.

Global Database

Amazon Aurora Global Database is an optional feature providing low-latency global reads and disaster recovery from region-wide outages. You pay for replicated write I/Os between the primary region and each secondary region. The number of replicated write I/Os to each secondary region is the same as the number of in-region write I/Os performed by the primary region. Apart from replicated write I/Os, you pay standard Aurora rates for instances, storage, cross-region data transfer, backup storage, and Backtrack, a feature that lets you quickly move a database to a prior point in time without needing to restore data from a backup.

Backup Storage

Backup storage for Amazon Aurora is the storage associated with your automated database backups and any customer-initiated DB cluster snapshots. Increasing your backup retention period or taking DB cluster snapshots increases the backup storage consumed.

  • Backup storage is allocated by Region. Total backup storage space is equivalent to the sum of the storage for all backups in that Region. 
  • Moving a DB cluster snapshot to another Region increases allocated backup storage in the destination Region. 
  • There is no additional charge for backup storage of up to 100% of your total Aurora database storage for each Aurora DB cluster. There is also no additional charge for backup storage if your backup retention period is one day and you don’t have any snapshots beyond the retention period. 
  • Backup storage, as well as snapshots you store after your DB cluster is deleted, will be charged at the following rates:

Backtrack

Backtrack lets you quickly move an Aurora database to a prior point in time without needing to restore data from a backup. This lets you quickly recover from user errors, such as dropping the wrong table or deleting the wrong row. This feature is currently available for the MySQL-compatible edition of Aurora. 

You need to specify how far in the past you want to be able to Backtrack (e.g., “up to 24 hours”). Aurora will retain logs, called Change Records, for the specified Backtrack duration. You pay a simple hourly rate for storing Change Records.

For example, suppose your Aurora database is generating 10,000 Change Records per hour – which you can see by reviewing your CloudWatch metrics – and you want to Backtrack up to 10 hours in the past. To support this, Aurora would need to store 10,000 Change Records/hour x 10 hours = 100,000 Change Records. Say the cost in the US East (N. Virginia) Region is $0.012/hour per 1 million Change Records. Turning on Backtrack would increase your costs by $0.012 x (100,000 / 1,000,000) = $0.0012/hour. 

When using Backtrack, you can review Amazon CloudWatch metrics in the AWS Console to see how many Change Records your database is generating per hour.

Snapshot or Cluster Export

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Snapshot Export provides an automated method to export data within an RDS or Aurora snapshot to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) in Parquet format. Cluster Export provides an automated method to export data from an Aurora database cluster to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) in Parquet format. The Parquet format is up to 2x faster to unload and consumes up to 6x less storage in Amazon S3 compared to text formats. You can analyze the exported data using AWS services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon SageMaker.

Data Transfer

The pricing below is based on data transferred “in” and “out” of Amazon Aurora.

  • As part of the AWS Free Tier, AWS customers receive 100 GB of free data transfer out to the internet free each month, aggregated across all AWS Services and Regions (except China and GovCloud).
  • Data transferred between Amazon Aurora and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances in the same Availability Zone is free. 
  • Data transferred between Availability Zones for DB cluster replication is free. 
  • For data transferred between an Amazon EC2 instance and Amazon Aurora DB instance in different Availability Zones of the same Region, Amazon EC2 Regional Data Transfer charges apply.

Except as otherwise noted, prices are exclusive of applicable taxes and duties, including VAT and applicable sales tax. For customers with a billing address in Japan, use of AWS is subject to Japanese Consumption Tax. Learn more.

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