Time Flies - AWS Aurora serverless has grown up

Maybe you remember my demo application leveraging AWS Aurora Serverless v1 on Postgres, using the built in data API and a React frontend. AWS has announced v1 deprecated a while ago and after a postponement, the end of v1 is likely coming by end of next month (March 2025).

The AWS community was not so amazed about having to migrate to Aurora v2 as it lacked two important features: 

  • Scaling down to zero which is important for low budget organizations or projects.
  • The data API, providing a highly convenient way to communicate with an RDBMS without any hassle in drivers and connection pooling
Now here's the good news: AWS has added both features to Aurora v2 in the meantime, and there is even more:

  • The data API request limit of 1000 requests per second does was removed for v2.
  • Due to the improved architecture, up- and downscaling performs faster. In particular, scaling up from 0 (the wake up scenario) is faster and results in improved user experience.
AWS has laid out a migration path from v1 to v2. To keep my Aurora serverless database alive, I followed the path which was not very complicated. It is just highly recommended to upgrade the source v1 database to the most current version possible. The migration happens through a so called Blue/Green Deployment. Here are some useful hints about that.

blue green deployment


The screenshot shows the Blue/Green deployment where the green (target) writer instance was already converted to serverless. The final steps are the deletion of the Blue/Green deployment and of the remaining old instance - after checking that the target database is fully consistent.


And there's a final good surprise: The data API of Aurora v2 is not only fully compatible with its v1 version, during the migration, existing API endpoints are migrated as well. No need to change anything in existing applications. So my "Northwind" demo application is still alive! Just the warning on the bottom of the homepage is outdated: Aurora v2 scales up so quickly that no backend timeouts occur anymore.

northwindhomepage









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