> I, personally, have seen many projects burning thousands a month in database costs because they prefer replicating the environment for testing branches.<p>If this is the premise for serverless database it's a weak start. If you really need lightweight DBMS for testing just run MySQL or PostgreSQL in Docker. If you really need access to production-like data (e.g., a lot of it so you get realistic distributions) run the same DBMS on cheap hardware or cheap instances. In both cases you can use persistent volumes and shut down when things are not in use. Few people really care if it takes a few minutes to spin up the test environment.<p>As for the main point of Aurora offering a "Serverless" architecture it looks as if what they've really done is enabled the DBMS compute layer to scale up and down quickly. I wonder if this optimization fell out of pushing redo log management down into the storage layer. (See Section 3.1 <a href="https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/p1041-verbitski.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/p1041-verbitski.p...</a> for details.)