Thread by @jeremy_daly

There are two major problems with Serverless Aurora v2 that fundamentally miss the mark of true #serverless(ness). One is the inability to auto-pause (as Mike mentions), and the other is the missing Data API. These might make it unusable (for now). ☹️ Some thoughts… 🧵

https://twitter.com/mikebroberts/status/1517508856594763777

Let’s start with the “scale to zero” bit. I think it’s unreasonable to expect a production cluster of Aurora to scale to zero and then be instantly accessible following a short cold start. However, this feature is crucial to development and preview environments.

One of the greatest features of #serverless apps is the ability to create “isolated stacks” that mirror production environments. Serverless apps should be as disposable as @QuinnyPig tweets. Spin ‘em up, tear ‘em down, and then move on to the next experiment.

“Always on” services (even at a 0.5 ACU minimum) make this practice cost prohibitive, especially if you’re spinning up PR and feature branches, or giving all your devs (like you should) their own sandbox account. At the very least, adding the “pause” feature would mitigate this.

Now to the Data API. At some point, we’re all going to need to get over this ridiculous idea of needing private subnets for #serverless applications. Your Lambdas are already running in a VPC, you most likely don’t need to add another one that you don’t know how to configure.

The Data API was a breath of fresh air when it was introduced. No need to run Lambdas in a VPC to access your RDBMS, but instead use the magic of IAM which @awscloud has invested limitless resources into making insanely efficient and secure? What a novel concept!

Sure, even with the Data API you still needed to spin up a “dev” cluster that was shared, but it dramatically reduced the need for VPCs and, of course, Managed NAT Gateways for outbound internet access in every temporary stack.

This brings us to where the major opportunity was missed IMO. Removing the need for Aurora Serverless v2 to run in a VPC and enabling both direct IAM access and Data API access would have been a true game changer.

The scaling characteristics still look amazing, and for the enterprise using this to failover provisioned clusters running in legacy VPCs then they probably hit the 🎯. But for the #serverless enthusiast looking for AWS to move the ball forward, prepare to be disappointed.