Amazon Aurora Limitless Database: Scaling to Millions of Transactions Per Second
Aurora Limitless Database, launched in 2024, is now production-ready for the most demanding workloads. It automatically shards your data across multiple Aurora instances while maintaining a single-database experience. Here’s what you need to know.
Aurora Limitless vs Traditional Aurora
| Feature | Aurora Standard | Aurora Limitless |
|---|---|---|
| Max write throughput | Single writer | Millions of writes/sec |
| Sharding | Manual (application) | Automatic (managed) |
| Storage limit | 128 TiB | Petabyte scale |
| Application changes | None | Minimal (shard key) |
How It Works
Aurora Limitless uses distributed routers and shards:
-- Create a sharded table
CREATE TABLE orders (
order_id BIGINT PRIMARY KEY,
customer_id BIGINT,
order_date TIMESTAMP,
total DECIMAL(10,2)
) WITH (
limitless = true,
shard_key = customer_id -- Distribution key
);
-- Reference tables replicated to all shards
CREATE TABLE products (
product_id INT PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(255),
price DECIMAL(10,2)
) WITH (
limitless = true,
collocated = true -- Full copy on each shard
);
-- Queries work normally
SELECT * FROM orders
WHERE customer_id = 12345; -- Routes to single shard
SELECT customer_id, SUM(total)
FROM orders
GROUP BY customer_id; -- Distributed query
When to Use Aurora Limitless
Ideal Use Cases
- SaaS applications with per-tenant sharding
- Gaming leaderboards and player data
- IoT time-series at massive scale
- E-commerce with millions of concurrent users
Migration Path
# 1. Create Limitless cluster
aws rds create-db-cluster \
--db-cluster-identifier my-limitless \
--engine aurora-postgresql \
--engine-mode limitless \
--master-username admin \
--master-user-password secret
# 2. Use DMS to migrate with minimal downtime
# 3. Update application connection string
# 4. Add shard keys to tables
Aurora Limitless removes the biggest scaling bottleneck in relational databases. If you’ve been considering NoSQL for scale, take another look at Aurora.
