AWS announced the general availability of a new version of its Aurora database this week called Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized. The big news in this release is that it removes all I/O charges for database usage, a move that should reduce overall database costs for customers with heavy workloads and provide more predictability. to your invoices from the cloud database.
“With Aurora’s new configuration, customers only pay for their DB instances and storage consumption with no I/O charges. Customers can now confidently predict the costs of 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 the company said in a statement.
And getting customers to migrate more workloads is the goal, of course. But with more companies looking to operate more efficiently in the cloud, a product like this could appeal to increasingly cost-conscious CIOs.
But it’s important to note that it’s a higher-priced product than the standard Aurora database, according to Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, a consulting firm that helps clients lower their utility bills. AWS. “It’s an alternative pricing model. They charge more for this model as a baseline fee, so it will come down to the specifics of a given workload as to whether it’s a good idea to use it,” Quinn told TechDigiPro.
In a blog post Announcing the new version, AWS’s Channy Yun acknowledged that it depends on the type of workload. “Now you can confidently predict the costs of your most I/O-intensive workloads, with cost savings of up to 40 percent when your I/O spend exceeds 25 percent of your current baseline spend. Aurora data. If you are using Reserved Instances, you will see even greater cost savings,” he wrote. As you can see, and as Quinn points out, the devil will definitely be in the details of your particular workload requirements.
Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, said it’s a win for customers with heavy workloads. “Normally, any time you read data that isn’t cached and then write it back to your MySQL or Postgres data, you incur an I/O charge,” he said. “This is designed to bring their prices down because they have found a more efficient way to handle this internally, and have passed the cost savings on to customers as we enter the AI age.”
This should be especially useful for customers with data-intensive workloads, such as AI or seasonal eCommerce use cases. Customers can bring in new workloads or move between Aurora’s standard database and the I/O-optimized version in the management console, depending on expected workloads, to help manage costs.
