Use Amazon Aurora for Dev & Test Workloads with new T2.Medium DB Instance Class

Amazon Aurora already allows you to make your choice of five DB instance classes ranging from the db.r3.large (2 vCPUs and 15 GiB of RAM) up to the db.r3.8xlarge (32 vCPUs and 244 GiB of RAM). These instances support a very wide range of production-scale applications and use cases.

Today we giving you a sixth choice, the new db.t2.medium DB instance class with 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB of RAM. Steady-state, this instance class has access to 40% of the performance of a single core, and can burst to full-core performance when processing CPU-intensive queries and other database tasks. Like the similarly-named EC2 instances, this new instance class starts out with a full allocation of CPU Credits, which are spent when the instance is active and accumulate when it is not (my post, New Low Cost EC2 Instances with Burstable Performance, contains a full explanation).

The db.t2.medium should be a great fit for many of your development and test scenarios, and you should also consider them for some of your less-demanding production workloads. You can monitor the CPUCreditUsage and CPUCreditBalance metrics to track the usage and accumulation of credits over tiem.

Now Available
You can create Amazon Aurora database instances that make use of this new DB instance class today. It is available in all regions where Amazon Aurora is currently available. Prices start at $0.082 per hour.

- Jeff;