I recently became aware of WeSQL. A MySQL-compatible database that separates compute and storage, using S3 as the storage layer. The product uses a columnar format by default which is significantly more space-efficient than InnoDB.

WeSQL introduces a new storage engine called SmartEngine using a LSM-tree-based structure that is ideal for a storage bucket implementation, and documentation shows the implementation of raft replication to combat latency concerns. There is a lot more information to review, the serverless architecture and WeScale, a database proxy and resource manager.

It was very easy to take it for an initial spin using a docker container and an AWS S3 bucket. I would really like to try CloudFlare R2 which implements the S3 API.

Under the covers there …

One of the most exciting features Amazon Aurora Serverless brings to the table is its ability to go to sleep (pause) when idle. This is a fantastic feature for development and test environments. You get access to a powerful database to run tests quickly, but it goes easy on your wallet as you only pay for storage when the instance is paused.

You can configure Amazon RDS Aurora Serverless to go to sleep after a specified period of time. This can be set to anywhere between five minutes and 24 hours

For this feature to work, however, inactivity has to be complete. If you have so much as a single query or even maintain an idle open connection, Amazon Aurora Serverless will not be able to pause.

This means, for example, that pretty much any monitoring you may have enabled, including our own …

When I attended AWS Re:Invent 2018, I saw there was a lot of attention from both customers and the AWS team on Amazon RDS Aurora Serverless. So I decided to take a deeper look at this technology, and write a series of blog posts on this topic.

In this first post of the series, you will learn about Amazon Aurora Serverless basics and use cases. In later posts, I will share benchmark results and in depth realization results.

What Amazon Aurora Serverless Is

A great source of information on this topic is How Amazon Aurora Serverless Works from the official AWS  documentation. In this article, you learn what Serverless deployment rather than provisional deployment means. Instead of specifying an instance …

Amazon Aurora Serverless — Features, Limitations, Glitches

Finally after an year AWS announced the AWS Aurora Serverless MySQL compatibility. I was expecting that they will release this in the reInvent 2018, but it live now. So now I’m expecting more new features for Aurora servers in the reInvent 2018. I have played with this baby and understood whats is doing and what we can do with that.

Here is the blog from AWS about Aurora Serverless

Aurora Serverless MySQL Generally Available | Amazon Web Services

What is Aurora Serverless?

Aurora serverless provides seamlessly scale up and down its compute and memory. You can pay for how much resources that you have been used. No needs of creating and managing the Read Replica and HA(Multi-AZ).

How Aurora Serverless works? Source: AWS

Serverless is a new buzzword in the database industry. Even though it gets tossed around often, there is some confusion about what it really means and how it really works. Serverless architectures rely on third-party Backend as a Service (BaaS) services. They can also include custom code that is run in managed, ephemeral containers on a Functions as a Service (FaaS) platform. In comparison to traditional Platform as a Service (PaaS) server architecture, where you pay a predetermined sum for your instances, serverless applications benefit from reduced costs of operations and lower complexity. They are also considered to be more agile, allowing for reduced engineering efforts.

In reality, there are still servers in a serverless architecture: they are just being used, managed, and maintained outside of the application. But isn’t that a lot like what cloud providers, such as Amazon RDS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, are already …