Connecting to Aurora Serverless
Our team is building analytics software and even in the beta phase we have gathered millions of records in our tables. The influx of data is unpredictable and the present set up of ingesting data is unreliable. That means constant monitoring and managing database instances and capacity. In the past we have increased capacity anticipating huge influx of data only to pay big bills for slim data. On the other hand, we have also had huge influx of data unexpectedly and had to increase the number of instances in hurry. Constant monitoring takes away precious time and resources. Aurora Serverless comes to our rescue in such situations. It is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration where the database automatically starts up, shuts down and scales up or down as required. It is ideal for unpredictable workloads. You pay on a per-second basis for the capacity that you use.
However, setting up Aurora Serverless did take some time and effort. If you are starting out to set up Aurora Serverless this post might help you. Please note, here I go into the details of setting up VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), Subnets, Security Groups, Aurora Serverless instance for MySql5.6 (the only one supported by Aurora Serverless when I wrote this blog), setting up EC2 instance and getting Aurora Serverless started on DataGrip.
So let’s get started!
Aurora Serverless Installation:
Setting up VPC:
First on AWS open VPC Dashboard by selecting VPC on services tab.
Here click on Launch VPC wizard
Select VPC with Public and Private Subnets
Here are the changes you need to make on the following screen:
Enter VPC name: vpc4asl
Enter public subnet name : Public web subnet
Enter private subnet name : Private db subnet 1
Select availability zone: US East 2a — for both public and private subnet
Instance type: t2.micro
Key pair name: any existing keypair
If you see this screen in the step two then click on Use a NAT instance instead
And you will see the following screen
Once all the details are filled up click on Create VPC button
Click Ok button and then click subnets from the panel in the left side
Now we create one more subnet in another region
Now you have 3 subnets. This is what it looks like.
Create 2 security groups:
To do this click on create security group and add following:
Click on Create
Edit inbound rules for this security group
Add another security group
Second one is for Private access to database
Click on Create
Edit Inbound rules for this security group
Copy groupid for myvpcsg4web and paste it as source
This is how it finally looks:
Now from your AWS dashboard go to RDS
We need to create new subnets — so here is how to do that
Click subnet groups
Click on Create DB Subnet Group
Click on Add all subnets related to this VPC
Please remove public subnet — That is the one with 10.0.0.0/24 CIDR
Click on Create and you will a screen looking something similar to the one below
Create Aurora Serverless cluster:
Now Create Aurora Serverless cluster
On RDS console select clusters
Click create database button
In the following screen select the following fields:
Virtual private cloud
Subnet group
Choose existing VPC security group
Select the security group we created for db and Remove default
Also remove check mark from enable deletion protection if you intend to delete the database after testing.
Click on Create database button.
This is what your cluster will look like
Create EC2 instance:
Next — from your AWS dashboard go to EC2 console and click on Launch Instance
In Step 1 — select instance with mySql, PHP, PostgresSQL etc..
In the configure instance detail make following changes:
Select network
Subnet
Enable Auto-assign Public IP
No changes on step 4 and 5
Step 6
Click on Select an existing security group
Select existing security group — select the one created for web
No changes on Step 7
Just click on Launch
And select an existing keypair that you may have
Your work on AWS dashboard ends here.
Connect to your Aurora Serverless cluster using Datagrip:
Now you can go to DataGrip and insert EC2 instance detail and Aurora cluster detail as following:
Now you have successfully connected to your database and you can start your work!
