Great article Lee! Aurora serverless is quite an interesting service, I completely understand the need for relational databases as there are cases where DynamoDB just isn’t suitable.

How are you finding the cold start performance of both Lambda and Aurora serverless? From our experience with Lambda using .NET and in a VPC, cold starts can take a considerable amount of time (around 20 seconds sometimes) which is getting close to the 30 seconds enforced timeout of API Gateway.

I personally would have liked to see Aurora serverless be more like DynamoDB (not in a VPC, just as a service you consume)— but I do understand why it’s been designed this way and am waiting to see how AWS progresses it in the future!