Earlier quoted context omitted.
aurora serverless pricing is not based on cpu cycles . this is just not how ACUs actually work or scale or are priced, at all man anyway i gather the answer to my question is that no, there are no other examples of managed sql dbs that bill the way you do. my complaint is this is inherently not transparent because it violates user expectations. users try comparing to io based provders and fail to understand the prici…
It's fairly difficult to find actual details on ACUs and how it all works, the best I found after spending significant time looking was things like: https://www.jeremydaly.com/aurora-serverless-the-good-the-ba... According to AWS you're paying for chunks of CPU and memory on a per second basis: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/faqs/ It's hard to imagine that the CPU capacity is measured in anything other than CPU cy…
i originally said pricing for other managed sql dbs, not specifically “serverless” ones. we both know that is just a marketing term anyway
with ACUs the point is you configure min and max, and your cluster scales up/down based on a cpu utilization threshold. so, sure reading from memory uses cpu cycles — but a large cached read is incredibly unlikely to bump you over a scaling threshold which affects your bill, unless you’re doing some huge heavy sort operations
another key point is aurora serverless v2 does not scale down to 0 acu. you are always paying a predictable small amount for your base cpu and ram. minor increases in cpu usage literally do not impact your bill at all, which is why i do not believe your argument makes sense regarding cached reads.
edit to add: the reason this matters for monetary cost of ELT/ETL is it often involves very large reads. if your jobs only extract recent/changed data, this will very likely be in buffer pool, and cost way less with io pricing than with your row based pricing. clear?