Creating an Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster - Amazon Aurora
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Creating an Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster

Important

Amazon has announced the end-of-life date for Aurora Serverless v1: March 31st, 2025. We strongly recommend upgrading any Aurora Serverless v1 DB clusters to Aurora Serverless v2 before that date. The upgrade can involve a change in the major version number of the database engine. Thus, it's important to plan, test, and implement this switchover before the end-of-life date. Starting January 8th, 2025, customers will no longer be able to create new Aurora Serverless v1 clusters or instances with either the Amazon Web Services Management Console or the CLI. For information about the migration process, see Upgrading from an Aurora Serverless v1 cluster to Aurora Serverless v2.

Aurora Serverless v2 scales more quickly and in a more granular way. Aurora Serverless v2 also has more compatibility with other Aurora features such as reader DB instances. You can learn about Aurora Serverless v2 in Using Aurora Serverless v2.

The following procedure creates an Aurora Serverless v1 cluster without any of your schema objects or data. If you want to create an Aurora Serverless v1 cluster that's a duplicate of an existing provisioned or Aurora Serverless v1 cluster, you can perform a snapshot restore or cloning operation instead. For those details, see Restoring from a DB cluster snapshot and Cloning a volume for an Amazon Aurora DB cluster. You can't convert an existing provisioned cluster to Aurora Serverless v1. You also can't convert an existing Aurora Serverless v1 cluster back to a provisioned cluster.

When you create an Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster, you can set the minimum and maximum capacity for the cluster. A capacity unit is equivalent to a specific compute and memory configuration. Aurora Serverless v1 creates scaling rules for thresholds for CPU utilization, connections, and available memory and seamlessly scales to a range of capacity units as needed for your applications. For more information see Aurora Serverless v1 architecture.

You can set the following specific values for your Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster:

  • Minimum Aurora capacity unit – Aurora Serverless v1 can reduce capacity down to this capacity unit.

  • Maximum Aurora capacity unit – Aurora Serverless v1 can increase capacity up to this capacity unit.

You can also choose the following optional scaling configuration options:

  • Force scaling the capacity to the specified values when the timeout is reached – You can choose this setting if you want Aurora Serverless v1 to force Aurora Serverless v1 to scale even if it can't find a scaling point before it times out. If you want Aurora Serverless v1 to cancel capacity changes if it can't find a scaling point, don't choose this setting. For more information, see Timeout action for capacity changes.

  • Pause compute capacity after consecutive minutes of inactivity – You can choose this setting if you want Aurora Serverless v1 to scale to zero when there's no activity on your DB cluster for an amount of time you specify. With this setting enabled, your Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster automatically resumes processing and scales to the necessary capacity to handle the workload when database traffic resumes. To learn more, see Pause and resume for Aurora Serverless v1.

Before you can create an Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster, you need an Amazon account. You also need to have completed the setup tasks for working with Amazon Aurora. For more information, see Setting up your environment for Amazon Aurora. You also need to complete other preliminary steps for creating any Aurora DB cluster. To learn more, see Creating an Amazon Aurora DB cluster.

Aurora Serverless v1 is available in certain Amazon Web Services Regions and for specific Aurora MySQL and Aurora PostgreSQL versions only. For more information, see Aurora Serverless v1.

Note

The cluster volume for an Aurora Serverless v1 cluster is always encrypted. When you create your Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster, you can't turn off encryption, but you can choose to use your own encryption key. With Aurora Serverless v2, you can choose whether to encrypt the cluster volume.

You can create an Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster with the Amazon CLI or the RDS API.

Note

If you receive the following error message when trying to create your cluster, your account needs additional permissions.

Unable to create the resource. Verify that you have permission to create service linked role. Otherwise wait and try again later.

See Using service-linked roles for Amazon Aurora for more information.

You can't directly connect to the DB instance on your Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster. To connect to your Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster, you use the database endpoint. You can find the endpoint for your Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster on the Connectivity & security tab for your cluster in the Amazon Web Services Management Console. For more information, see Connecting to an Amazon Aurora DB cluster.

To create a new Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster with the Amazon CLI, run the create-db-cluster command and specify serverless for the --engine-mode option.

You can optionally specify the --scaling-configuration option to configure the minimum capacity, maximum capacity, and automatic pause when there are no connections.

The following command examples create a new Serverless DB cluster by setting the --engine-mode option to serverless. The examples also specify values for the --scaling-configuration option.

Example for Aurora MySQL

The following command creates a new Aurora MySQL–compatible Serverless DB cluster. Valid capacity values for Aurora MySQL are 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256.

For Linux, macOS, or Unix:

aws rds create-db-cluster --db-cluster-identifier sample-cluster \
    --engine aurora-mysql --engine-version 5.7.mysql_aurora.2.11.4 \
    --engine-mode serverless \
    --scaling-configuration MinCapacity=4,MaxCapacity=32,SecondsUntilAutoPause=1000,AutoPause=true \
    --master-username username --master-user-password password

For Windows:

aws rds create-db-cluster --db-cluster-identifier sample-cluster ^
    --engine aurora-mysql --engine-version 5.7.mysql_aurora.2.11.4 ^
    --engine-mode serverless ^
    --scaling-configuration MinCapacity=4,MaxCapacity=32,SecondsUntilAutoPause=1000,AutoPause=true ^
    --master-username username --master-user-password password

Example for Aurora PostgreSQL

The following command creates a new PostgreSQL 13.9–compatible Serverless DB cluster. Valid capacity values for Aurora PostgreSQL are 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 192, and 384.

For Linux, macOS, or Unix:

aws rds create-db-cluster --db-cluster-identifier sample-cluster \
    --engine aurora-postgresql --engine-version 13.9 \
    --engine-mode serverless \
    --scaling-configuration MinCapacity=8,MaxCapacity=64,SecondsUntilAutoPause=1000,AutoPause=true \
    --master-username username --master-user-password password

For Windows:

aws rds create-db-cluster --db-cluster-identifier sample-cluster ^
    --engine aurora-postgresql --engine-version 13.9 ^
    --engine-mode serverless ^
    --scaling-configuration MinCapacity=8,MaxCapacity=64,SecondsUntilAutoPause=1000,AutoPause=true ^
    --master-username username --master-user-password password

To create a new Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster with the RDS API, run the CreateDBCluster operation and specify serverless for the EngineMode parameter.

You can optionally specify the ScalingConfiguration parameter to configure the minimum capacity, maximum capacity, and automatic pause when there are no connections. Valid capacity values include the following:

  • Aurora MySQL: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256.

  • Aurora PostgreSQL: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 192, and 384.