How do I use a Spinup Serverless database

Owned by Tenyo Grozev (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Mar 30, 2021
2 min read

 

What is it?

Dedicated Serverless databases in Spinup allow users to quickly create a database which can automatically shut down when there are no requests and start up on demand. All you need to specify is the minimum and maximum range of available capacity and the database will automatically scale memory and CPU resources based on utilization. Disk size will also adjust automatically as needed.
Currently the two available offerings are PostgreSQL (10) and MySQL (5.7). Minor version updates will be transparently applied when they become available.
Some good use cases are infrequently used environments (e.g. dev/test), or applications with variable/unpredictable workloads.

How does it work?

Spinup Serverless databases are based on AWS Aurora Serverless v1. In the background it creates a database cluster and adds/removes nodes based on the specified capacity range, and routes requests among them automatically. When adding a new node, memory, CPU and networking are all being increased at the same time. The nodes live in different data centers and if one fails, another one is automatically started in its place. The underlying encrypted storage is also replicated among several availability zones and can grow from 10 GiB to 128 TiB.
When creating the cluster, if “Auto Pause” is selected, Aurora will automatically shut down all nodes after a specified inactivity time (minimum is 5 minutes) which saves on costs when the database is idle. When a new database request comes in, the cluster is restarted (can take up to 1 minute).

How do I use it?

From your Spinup space create a new "Dedicated MySQL - Serverless" or “Dedicated PostgreSQL - Serverless” resource. Note that these are only available for low-risk spaces at this time.

Configuration is similar for both MySQL and Postgres and you will notice that currently you don’t get a choice for a specific version but just the latest version that is currently available from AWS Aurora.

Pick the Minimum and Maximum capacity listed as GB of RAM, however, keep in mind that CPU and network capacity also increase proportionately.

You can enable “Auto pause” and enter number of minutes of inactivity before pausing the database.

Enter username and password, and click “Create database”. It may take about 10 minutes before the database is fully up and running.