CASE 126 · SPARTAN · 2025
Aurora I/O-Optimized for the workload, Standard for the rest.
A trading systems company ran a heavy Aurora Postgres cluster — high IOPS, predictable I/O cost. The team had stayed on Aurora Standard because they didn’t know what Aurora I/O-Optimized was. We modelled the workloads and migrated the right clusters to I/O-Optimized.
Trading systems
COST
2025
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
AURORA COST
−27%
IO-OPTIMIZED ELIGIBLE
6 / 11
I/O BILL VOLATILITY
FLAT
MIGRATION DOWNTIME
0
HOW IT WENT
Aurora I/O-Optimized has a flat per-instance price including all I/O; Aurora Standard bills I/O separately and is cheaper for low-I/O workloads. The break-even depends on the workload’s I/O-to-instance-cost ratio. We modelled each cluster against the threshold using six months of CloudWatch metrics.
Six of eleven clusters came out clearly on the I/O-Optimized side — heavy I/O, predictable, the kind of workload Aurora Standard punishes you for. The migration was an in-place configuration change with no downtime. The other five clusters stayed on Standard because their I/O was modest.
On the migrated 6, Aurora cost dropped 27%. The bigger psychological win was flat I/O cost — no more month-end I/O bill spikes when trading volume increased. Finance stopped getting surprised by Aurora line items.
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