AWS Database Blog

Introducing scaling up to 256 ACUs with Amazon Aurora Serverless v2

AWS announced that Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 supports database capacity of up to 256 Aurora Capacity Units (ACUs). Aurora Serverless v2 is an on-demand, auto scaling configuration for Amazon Aurora. It adjusts capacity in fine-grained increments to provide the right amount of database resources that the application needs. There is no database capacity for you to manage. You pay only for the capacity your application consumes.

Aurora Serverless v2 supports all manner of database workloads. Examples include development and test environments, websites, and applications that have infrequent, intermittent, or unpredictable workloads to the most demanding, business-critical applications that require high scale and high availability. It supports key Aurora features, including Amazon Aurora Global Database, Multi-AZ deployments, and read replicas. Aurora Serverless v2 is available for Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition.

With Aurora Serverless v2, you set the database capacity range at cluster level and each instance within the cluster scales within this range based on the workload. Aurora Serverless v2 capacity is defined by ACUs. Each ACU is a combination of approximately 2 gibibytes (GiB) of memory, corresponding CPU, and networking. With this launch, the maximum database capacity supported for Aurora Serverless v2 is 256 ACUs (512 GiB) instead of the previously supported 128 ACUs (256 GiB). You can now use Aurora Serverless v2 for workloads that require a memory higher than 256 GiB. To learn more about capacity setting for Aurora Serverless v2, see Choosing the Aurora Serverless v2 capacity range for an Aurora cluster.

Enabling Aurora Serverless v2 maximum capacity of 256 ACUs

To start enjoying the higher Aurora Serverless v2 maximum capacity of 256 ACUs, you need to use following versions of Aurora: Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible 13.13+, 14.10+, 15.5+, 16.1+, and Aurora MySQL-Compatible 3.06+. You can get started with higher database capacity with a new cluster or instance, as well as your existing cluster on the AWS Management Console. For a new cluster, select the desired capacity for the maximum capacity setting. For existing compatible clusters, update the maximum capacity setting. For existing incompatible instances that don’t allow capacity higher than 128 ACUs, add a new reader with the higher capacity to the existing cluster and fail over to the new instance and remove the old instance.

Another option for existing clusters is to use Amazon RDS blue/green deployments. With this approach, the green cluster will have new compute instances. Then after testing, you can switch over and start enjoying the maximum capacity of 256 ACUs.

To change the maximum capacity (ACU) for existing Aurora Serverless v2 instances that support it, complete the following steps:

  1. On the Amazon RDS console, in the navigation pane, choose Databases.
  2. Select the Aurora cluster you want to change.
  3. Choose Modify.
  4. In the Instance configuration section, change Maximum capacity (ACUs) to your desired value.
  5. Choose Continue.
  6. Review and choose if you want to apply settings during the next maintenance window or immediately.
  7. Choose Modify cluster.

After the change takes effect, the console shows the capacity setting for your Aurora Serverless v2 cluster.

See database capacity beyond 128 ACUs in action

We used the TPC-C benchmark to observe capacity scaling for Aurora Serverless v2. The following Amazon CloudWatch graph shows that Aurora Serverless v2 scales beyond the previous limit of 128 ACUs and scales over the 200 ACUs that our test workload was demanding.

With a higher maximum ACU limit, Aurora Serverless v2 scales to handle larger and more demanding workloads than before. You can run spikier traffic patterns without running into resource constraints. More ACUs translate to higher compute and memory resources, enabling faster query processing and improved response times. For example, if your variable workload required memory higher than 256 GiB, you can now use Aurora Serverless v2.

Conclusion

In this post, we walked you through the steps for updating capacity up to 256 ACUs. With this launch, you can now run even more demanding workloads with Aurora Serverless v2.

About the Authors

Anum Jang Sher is a product manager on the Amazon Aurora team. She is passionate about building delightful customer experiences for scalable, cost-effective, and highly available database solutions. In her current role, she is committed to understanding customer needs and translating them into innovative features to enhance Amazon Aurora.

Stas Bogachinsky is a Database Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He works with AWS customers to design, secure, and optimize their database workloads.