A structured guide to reducing Amazon Aurora database costs using modern AWS features beyond traditional right-sizing. Covers seven strategies: compute optimization via Aurora Serverless v2 (including scale-to-zero), start/stop schedules for non-production clusters, Reserved Instances vs. Database Savings Plans decision framework, I/O-Optimized storage for high-I/O workloads (up to 40% savings), query and schema optimization to reduce billable I/O, headless clusters for cost-effective cross-region disaster recovery, Aurora Auto Scaling for read replicas, selective MySQL replication filters, database consolidation, and feature-level optimizations like fast cloning and RDS Proxy. Includes a workload-type decision matrix and implementation steps for cost monitoring, tagging, and alerting.
