At its annual re:Invent conference, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced several new serverless services designed to automate and optimize database, caching, and data warehouse workloads for customers.
The new offerings promise to remove major management headaches for companies operating at massive scale while delivering instant scalability and high availability.
Simplify Massive Aurora Workloads with New “Limitless Database”
The highlight announcement came from AWS VP Matt Wood regarding major upgrades to Aurora Serverless, the company’s auto-scaling relational database. Wood said Aurora Serverless has proven hugely popular for accelerating cloud database deployments, but managing extremely high volumes remained problematic.
“Once you get to very, very high scale, and you’re dealing with tens of millions of customers, or millions of different records, it becomes challenging for customers to deal with those kinds of numbers, forcing them to break the database into multiple pieces,” Wood explained.
“What you have to do as a customer to be able to handle that scale is split the data up into smaller and smaller segments, and then manage those segments independently. It’s called sharding. And it’s kind of a pain.”
To solve this, AWS unveiled Aurora Serverless v2, dubbed the “Limitless Database.” The new architecture completely automates the sharding process, dynamically optimizing performance by splitting the database into segments and directing queries to the right shards. Companies now benefit from a single database that infinitely scales out and up without any extra work.
“It handles all of that sharding for you under the hood completely automatically,” said Wood. “As your needs change, the database service itself will make those adjustments and manage those shards automatically.” This removes a huge pain point around scaling while enabling fast queries no matter the data volume.
Ultra-Fast Caching Now Highly Available and Serverless
AWS also launched Elastic Cache Serverless for Redis, which brings the same hands-off automation to in-memory caching while delivering microsecond performance. Elastic Cache sits between application servers and databases, improving response times and reducing costs.
The new serverless configuration scales instantly to gigabytes and terabytes of capacity per second. It also launches highly available clusters spanning Availability Zones (AZs) to remove single points of failure. Companies can now set up an instantly scalable cached without worrying about management.
“You can set up highly available caches with microsecond response times, ready to scale for pretty much any volume you can throw at it in under a minute,” said Wood. By auto-scaling and self-healing, AWS has made ultra-fast caching truly hassle-free.
Redshift Data Warehouses Scale Intelligently with No Ops Work
AWS capped its serverless announcements by infusing its Redshift data warehouse service with similar intelligent automation. The new Redshift Serverless feature leverages AWS artificial intelligence to optimize performance based on changing query loads and data volumes.
Redshift Serverless clusters now automatically scale up to handle demanding analytic workloads then scale back down during lighter activity, eliminating unused capacity. The service interprets query patterns using advanced algorithms to refine data distribution and maximize parallelism, delivering faster results without any admin involvement.
As Wood summarized, “Redshift Serverless uses AI to optimize and scale Amazon Redshift data warehouses based on query patterns and data volumes, greatly reducing the amount of work IT needs to do.” Companies can focus solely on their data analytics rather than the underlying infrastructure.
Serverless Solves Key Cloud Challenges
The overarching theme across these new services is leveraging serverless architectures to remove major operational burdens for customers. Serverless computing abstracts away servers, capacity planning, scaling concerns, and other DevOps tasks, delivering seamless scalability and built-in resiliency.
The net result for AWS users are database, caching, and analytics solutions that configure in minutes yet intelligently adapt to handle extreme workloads while staying highly performant and available. Companies on AWS can drive innovation rather than struggling to manage infrastructure.
These serverless enhancements promise to solve multiple cloud migration and management challenges. Aurora Serverless, Elastic Cache Serverless, and Redshift Serverless reflect AWS’s continued push towards ever more refined automation and ease of use through all layers of the cloud stack.