In May, Amazon brought out a new Aurora I/O Optimized Serverless instance type. By switching to it, we cut our database costs by 43% overnight, saving us about $1,200 per month.

No strings attached. Just lower prices.

So what’s the magic? Well, customers of our SQL ConstantCare® service send us diagnostic data every day for thousands of SQL Servers around the world. We import that data, process it, analyze it, and then send emails with specific actions we want the customers to take on their servers.

It’s a lot of data shuffling around, which means a lot of IO. We bring in so much new data every day, and we only keep 30 days of it online. We can’t just tune queries to cut IO: it’s legitimately new data going into the system, and that’s gotta make it to disk. (We’ve even tried cutting the data we import, too.)

When we broke out costs per day, the top cost was IO:

That’s the magic of AWS’s newest serverless price offering: it’s specifically designed for people who do a lot of IO. Amazon’s press release said it would offer “up to 40% cost savings for I/O intensive applications where I/O charges exceed 25% of the total Aurora database spend.” That’s us, alright!

If you’re using AWS Aurora, and your StorageIOUsage costs are like ours, you owe it to yourself to flip the switch over to the new instance type. Go into the portal, modify your cluster, and check out the storage configuration options:

You can switch over to I/O optimized with just mouse clicks, no cluster changes or app changes required. If you find out the cost structure doesn’t work out in your favor, you can just switch right back. (AWS does have guardrails in place to make sure you don’t flip back & forth repeatedly for busy periods.)

This new change helped us confidently run free trials for SQL ConstantCare® this month, too. Why not try it and see what you learn about your SQL Servers?