Amazon Aurora Serverless is an on-demand, autoscaling configuration for Aurora (MySQL-compatible edition) where the database automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales up or down capacity based on your application's needs. It enables you to run your database in the cloud without managing any database instances. Aurora Serverless is a simple, cost-effective option for infrequent, intermittent, or unpredictable workloads. In this session, we explore these use cases, take a look under the hood, and delve into the future of serverless databases. We also hear a case study from a customer building new functionality on top of Aurora Serverless.

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Aurora Serverless
Sandor Maurice
Sr. Engineering Manager
Amazon RDS
D A T 3 3 6
Joshua Eichorn
CTO
Pagely

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Related breakouts
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What’s New in Amazon Aurora
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Tuesday, November 27
DAT304 - Deep Dive on Amazon Aurora with MySQL Compatibility
6:15 PM – 7:15 PM | Venetian, Level 4, Marcello 4505
Thursday, November 29
Amazon Aurora Storage Demystified: How It All Works
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM | Venetian, Level 4, Lando 4305

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Agenda
• RDS & Aurora fundamentals
• Aurora Serverless
• How it works
• What’s new?
• Case Study - Pagely

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Amazon RDS is . . .
Cloud native engine Open source engines Commercial engines
RDS platform
• Automatic fail-over
• Backup & recovery
• X-region replication
• Isolation & security
• Industry compliance
• Automated patching
• Advanced monitoring
• Routine maintenance
• Push-button scaling
Image credit: By Mackphillips - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55946550

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Amazon Aurora is . . .. . .
Cloud native engine Open source engines Commercial engines
RDS platform
• Automatic fail-over
• Backup & recovery
• X-region replication
• Isolation & security
• Industry compliance
• Automated patching
• Advanced monitoring
• Routine maintenance
• Push-button scaling
Image credit: By Mackphillips - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55946550

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Amazon Aurora - databases reimagined for the cloud
Speed and availability of high-end commercial databases
Simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases
Drop-in compatibility with MySQL and PostgreSQL
Simple pay as you go pricing
Delivered as a fully managed service

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Availability zone 1
Region
Availability zone 2 Availability zone 3
Scale-out, distributed, multi-tenant design . . .
Purpose-built log-structured,
distributed storage
Shared storage volume
Storage nodes with SSDs
Master
SQL
Transactions
Caching
Reader
5
Reader
9
SQL
Transactions
Caching
SQL
Transactions
Caching
Reader
1
SQL
Transactions
Caching
Reader
8
SQL
Transactions
Caching
Reader
15
SQL
Transactions
Caching
… … …
10GiB stripes
Master and up to 15 Readers
all point to the same storage
6-way replication, 2 per AZ
Quorums survive AZ+1 failure

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Availability zone 1
Region
Availability zone 2 Availability zone 3
With provisioned Aurora, you size the master yourself
Shared storage volume
Storage nodes with SSDs
Master
SQL
Transactions
Caching
Size for the peak load
-or-
Continuously monitor and
manually scale up/down

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Aurora Serverless . . .
Responds to your application automatically
• Scale capacity
• Shut down
• Start up

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Example #1 – episodic dev-test workload
VolumeWriteIOPs, 120-hour window

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Example #2 – mostly idle dev-test workload
VolumeWriteIOPs, 120-hour window

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Example #3 – spiky gaming workload
VolumeWriteIOPs, 120-hour window

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Example #4 – ecommerce production workload
VolumeWriteIOPs, 24-hour window

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You have some choices to make . . .
Provision for peak
Continuously monitor and
manually scale up/down
-or-
Expensive
Hard
• Requires experts
• Risks outages
Provision less than peak End-user (business) impact
-or-

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Database capacity management
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
Master

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Database capacity management
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
Original master Scale-up target
Add a scale-up target

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Database capacity management
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
Original master New master
Cutover

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Database capacity management
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
Original master New master

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Database capacity management
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
Original master Scale-up target
Add a proxy, shield the application
from connection changesProxy

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Database capacity management
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
New scale-up target
Proxy
New master
Cutover

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Database capacity management – is hard
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
New scale-up target
Proxy
New master

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Aurora Serverless . . .
Responds to your application load automatically
• Scale capacity with no downtime
• Multi-tenant proxy is highly available
• Scale target has warm buffer pool
• Shuts down when not in use

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How does it work . . .
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
Multi-tenant proxy layer
Warm-pool of Aurora instances
Monitoring service

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How does it work . . .
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
Multi-tenant proxy layer
Warm-pool of Aurora instances
Monitoring service

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How does it work . . .
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
Multi-tenant proxy layer
Warm-pool of Aurora instances
Monitoring service

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How does it work . . .
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
Multi-tenant proxy layer
Warm-pool of Aurora instances
Monitoring service

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How does it work . . .
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
Multi-tenant proxy layer
Warm-pool of Aurora instances
Monitoring service

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How does it work . . .
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
Multi-tenant proxy layer
Warm-pool of Aurora instances
Monitoring service

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How does it work . . .
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
Multi-tenant proxy layer
Warm-pool of Aurora instances
Monitoring service

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How does it work . . .
Availability zone 1
Region
App
Shared distributed storage volume
Multi-tenant proxy layer
Warm-pool of Aurora instances
Monitoring service

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How does it work in practice?
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How does it work in practice?
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How does it work in practice?
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How does it work in practice?
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That said . . .

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Introducing RDS Data API
• Simple web service protocol for database access
• SQL statements packaged as HTTP requests
• Access your database from AWS Lambda and AWS AppSync
• Access your database from the AWS SDK & CLI
Data API Service
Aurora Serverless

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Introducing RDS Console Query Editor
• Access your database from
AWS Management Console
• No database client application
or terminal required

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Aurora Serverless – for PostgreSQL
Now in preview, sign-up today:
https://pages.awscloud.com/amazon-
aurora-postgresql-serverless-
preview.html

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Aurora Serverless – more regions
• Aurora Serverless newly available in:
• Seoul
• Singapore
• Sydney
• Mumbai
• N. California
• London, Paris
• Frankfurt
• Central Canada

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Invoking Data API from Lambda
ExecuteSqlRequest sqlRequest = new ExecuteSqlRequest();
sqlRequest.setSqlStatements(String.format("Select count(*) from
Demo.Cities where City = '%s' group by City;", city));
ExecuteSqlResult result = awsRDSDataAPI.executeSql(sqlRequest);
Long peopleFromCityCount =
result.getSqlStatementResults().get(0).getResultFrame().getRecords()
.get(0).getValues().get(0).getBigIntValue();
https://github.com/aws-samples/amazon-rds-data-api-demo

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Joshua Eichorn
CTO
Pagely

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WordPress powers 32% of the Web
• More than blogs and CMS
• Ecommerce
• Membership sites
• Custom Apps
• Pagely brings
• Devops
• Scale
• Piece of mind

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• Serverless Application Hosting
• Autoscaling
• Workflow

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Northstack High Level Architecture

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Details
• Using ECS for compute
• App gateway + workers can stop
• Each production app gets its own
Aurora Serverless
• For cacheable sites only the
gateway is running
Picture: Aurora 2010 / Michael R. P. Ragazzon / Creative Commons

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Elastic Database is Hard
• WordPress read after write limits slave usefulness
• Single tenant option
• Resizing a master means failover
• Failover = outage
• Multi-tenant option
• Constant balancing chore
• Noisy neighbors
Picture: Elastic Close-Up / Marco Verch / Creative Commons

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Aurora Serverless a perfect fit
• Scales the master
• Scaling without downtime
• Less work needed from my team
• Pausing
Picture: Perfect. / taraesque / Creative Commons

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Things to watch out for
• Resume from pause time is
inconsistent
• Aurora needs a place to
scale
• MySQL server has gone
away errors
Picture: ShelbyPeek / josephdepalma / Creative Commons

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Managing timeouts around pause
• Biggest cost savings come from pause
• Resume is high time variance

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A WordPress Slow query Story
• Full table scans of meta_value are common
• 2 ACU query takes 10 minutes
• 8 ACU query takes < 2 seconds

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Giving Aurora a place to scale
• Add query timeouts
• Be careful about global timeouts
• Not always easy
• SET SESSION MAX_EXECUTION_TIME=2000; <- Mysql 5.7 only 
• Sysown Proxysql mysql-default_query_timeout 
• For PHP use mysqlnd + mysqlnd.net_read_timeout 
Picture: Waimea expanse / Alex Schwab / Creative Commons

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MySQL server has gone away errors
• More common with Aurora
Serverless
• Timeouts increase occurrence
• Enable auto reconnect if possible
• Custom DB driver in WordPress to
catch and reconnect
• Sysown Proxysql
Picture: Gone / Marina del Castell / Creative Commons

60. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Sandor Maurice
samauri@amazon.com
Joshua Eichorn
joshua.eichorn@pagely.com

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