Aurora Serverless is designed for workloads with unpredictable or intermittent usage patterns that benefit from automatic scaling. However, when used for databases with constant load, the service’s elasticity offers little advantage and adds cost overhead. Serverless instances run continuously in steady workloads, resulting in persistent ACU billing at a higher effective rate than a provisioned cluster of similar size. In addition, Serverless configurations cannot use Reserved Instances or Savings Plans, missing out on predictable cost reductions available to provisioned Aurora.
Aurora Provisioned clusters are billed by instance type and size, with options for Reserved Instance or Savings Plan discounts. Aurora Serverless clusters are billed per Aurora Capacity Unit (ACU) per second, with pricing optimized for variable workloads. When workloads are steady, Serverless’ dynamic pricing leads to consistently higher costs compared to equivalent provisioned instances.
