Pricing overview

Amazon Aurora DSQL is the fastest serverless distributed SQL database with virtually unlimited scale, the highest availability, and zero infrastructure management. It automatically scales storage and compute resources to match your workload demand without any manual intervention. With Aurora DSQL, there are no upfront costs, and you only pay for the resources you use. Your monthly bill is charged on two primary measures: Distributed Processing Unit (DPU) and storage. With the AWS Free Tier, you can get started on Aurora DSQL for free.

DPU and storage pricing

Aurora DSQL measures all request-based activity, such as query processing, reads, and writes, using a single normalized billing unit called Distributed Processing Unit (DPU). Storage is billed based on the total size of your database, measured in GB-month. Aurora DSQL ensures your data is available and strongly consistent across three Availability Zones in an AWS Region. You are only charged for one logical copy of your data. For more details, please see Pricing FAQs at the bottom of this page.

Free tier

With Aurora DSQL, your first 100,000 DPUs and 1 GB-month of storage each month is free. This is automatically applied to your monthly bill. For more details on how Aurora DSQL free tier works, go to the AWS Free Tier.

Data transfer costs

For data transfer “in” and “out” of Aurora DSQL, standard AWS data transfer costs will apply. For more details, go to Amazon EC2 pricing for data transfer costs.

  Transfer Type Charges
AWS Data Transfer Inter-Region Charges apply for source and destination transfer
Intra-Region No charge
Data Transfer To/From Internet To (In) No charge
From (Out) Charges apply*

* AWS customers receive 100GB of data transfer out to the internet free each month, aggregated across all AWS Services and Regions (except China and GovCloud). The 100 GB free tier for data transfer out to the internet is global and does not apply separately or individually to AWS Regions.

Aurora DSQL automatically replicates writes across AWS Regions to support multi-Region clusters. These replicated writes do not incur separate data transfer charges.

Backup and restore costs

You can use AWS Backup to back up and restore your Aurora DSQL clusters. AWS Backup is a fully managed service that helps you centralize and automate data protection across AWS services. The following table lists the pricing incurred through AWS Backup. See AWS Backup pricing for more details.

Pricing examples

  • Your gaming application creates variable activity with peak activity on evenings and weekends. At peak, your Aurora DSQL cluster in the US East (Ohio) operates at 2 DPUs per second and operates as low as 0.1 DPU per second during non-peak hours. Overall, the cluster operates at an average 0.5 DPU per second for the month. For storage, the Aurora DSQL cluster uses 10 GB of storage at the beginning of the month and grows to 20 GB by the end of the month, averaging 15 GB-months. The estimated total monthly cost for the gaming application would be as follows:

    Usage Calculation Cost
    DPUs 0.5 DPU * 2.628M second/month = 1.314M DPU/month $10.512
    1.314M DPU/month * $8/million DPU
    Storage 15 GB-months * $0.33/GB $4.95
    Total bill for the month   $15.462

  • You have a mission-critical banking application that maintains a record of all transactions submitted across the world. To maintain high availability and also offer low latencies for your users, you create a DSQL cluster located in the US East (N. Virginia) and peer it with a DSQL cluster in the US East (Ohio), resulting in a multi-Region peered cluster. It averages 0.5 DPU worth of activity per second in each Region. For storage, each Region averages 25 GB-months of storage. The estimated total monthly cost for the banking application would be as follows:

    Usage Calculation Cost
    DPU in US East (N. Virginia) 0.5 DPU * 2.628M seconds/month = 1.314M DPUs/month $10.512
    1.314M DPUs/month * $8/million DPUs
    DPU in US East (Ohio) 0.5DPU * 2.628M seconds/month = 1.314M DPUs/month $10.512
    1.314M DPUs/month * $8/million DPUs
    Storage in US East (N. Virginia) 25 GB-months * $0.33/GB $8.25
    Storage in US East (Ohio) 25 GB-months * $0.33/GB $8.25
    Total bill for the month   $37.524

FAQs

  • You are billed on a monthly basis. Billing is based on: 1/ Distributed Processing Units (DPUs) and 2/ storage. A DPU is a normalized billing unit for all request-based activity—such as query processing, reads, and writes—in Aurora DSQL. Storage is billed in GB-months.

  • You are billed for storage in GB-months, prorated on an hourly basis. You are only metered for storage based on one logical copy of the data. Aurora DSQL continuously monitors the amount of data stored in your database and calculates an hourly average to determine your storage usage.

  • With the AWS Free Tier, the first 100,000 DPUs and 1 GB-month of storage is billed at no charge each month. Any excess DPUs and storage beyond the Free Tier amount in a given month will be charged at the Regional DPU and GB-month storage cost. For example, if you used 150,000 DPUs and 5 GB-months of storage last month, you would be charged for 50,000 DPUs and 4 GB-months of storage. If you have an organization set up through AWS Organizations, this applies per management account.

  • You are charged only for the DPUs and storage used. You are charged for DPUs in the Region where your request originates, plus an additional charge for data replicated to multi-Region peered-clusters. You are not charged for your witness cluster. You are only charged for one logical copy of data per multi-Region peered cluster.

  • No, you will not incur fees for the witness Region.

  • Detailed breakdown of your DPU usage can be found in the Amazon CloudWatch dashboard for your DSQL cluster. This includes four usage metrics—1/ ReadDPU, 2/ WriteDPU, 3/ ComputeDPU, and 4/ MultiRegionWriteDPU—that, when totaled, approximate your billed DPU.

  • No, these are not billing metrics. However, when aggregated, they approximate the total DPUs billed at the end of the month. DPUs are normalized, meaning one million compute, write, read, or multi-Region DPUs are each equivalent to $8. So, regardless of the mix (such as 500 write DPUs and 500 read DPUs or 300 write DPUs and 700 read DPUs), the total cost remains $8 per million DPUs.

  • Your results may vary, but to establish a reference for what can be accomplished with 100K DPUs, we executed a small benchmark with a 95/5 read/write mix using transactions derived from the TPC-C benchmark. Based on this benchmark, 100K DPUs were equivalent to ~700,000 TPC-C transactions.

  • Yes, DPUs are fractional. For example, you may be charged 50.015 DPUs for your monthly cluster activity.