Amazon launched AWS re:Invent, its annual customer conference, in Las Vegas tonight with a handful of new serverless offerings designed to make it easier to manage serverless services Aurora, Elastic Cache, and Redshift.
Aurora Serverless is great for getting a cloud database up and running very quickly, but over time, once you get to very large scale, and dealing with tens of millions of customers, or millions of different records, it becomes difficult to… Customers deal with these types of numbers, forcing them to split the database into multiple parts. “What you have to do as a customer to be able to sort of handle that scale is that traditionally you had to break the data into smaller and smaller segments, and then manage those segments independently. It’s called syndication. It’s kind of a pain in the ass,” Wood told TechCrunch. “.
“We’re announcing a borderless database, which handles all that sharding for you completely automatically. So, as a customer as your needs change, the database service itself, without the Aurora server, will be able to make those adjustments and manage those shards automatically.” This enables customers to work with a single database, and should eliminate the huge management headache that existed before this feature was created.
Meanwhile, the company also announced Elastic Cache Serverless, a serverless caching service that sits between your application servers and your database and improves response times and reduces database costs.
“And what we’re adding here is that we’re making all of that serverless in a way that’s highly available for mission-critical applications running across availability zones,” Wood said. “So you can set up a highly available cache with microsecond response times, that’s ready to scale to almost any size of data that you want to use.” You can send it to her in less than a minute.”
Finally, the company announces that Redshift Serverless now uses AI to automatically optimize and scale Amazon Redshift data warehouses based on query patterns and data volumes, dramatically reducing the amount of work IT needs to do behind the scenes.
Since each of these options is non-hardware, it means Amazon manages all the machines in the background, provisioning the right amount of resources they need, and scaling them out when needed without IT having to handle all the back-end administration work.