Project the Aurora cluster volume in billed 10 GB increments, its I/O charges, and how much of the 128 TiB ceiling you use.
Aurora bills the data actually in the cluster volume rather than a pre-provisioned disk, but it does so in 10 GB increments, so the effective bill always rounds up. I/O is metered separately on Aurora Standard: converting a steady requests-per-second rate into a monthly figure needs the 2,628,000 seconds in a 730-hour month, which is why a modest-looking 800 IO/s becomes over two billion billable requests a month. The storage and I/O rates are editable defaults for us-east-1 — confirm current Aurora prices with AWS for your region. The cluster volume no longer shrinks automatically after a large delete on older engine versions, so knowing the trajectory towards the 128 TiB ceiling — and the I/O bill that comes with it — is what tells you when to shard or archive.
Aurora Storage
billed volume = ceil(projected GB ÷ 10) × 10; I/O cost = I/O per second × 2,628,000 seconds ÷ 1,000,000 × price per million.
billed volume = ceil(projected GB ÷ 10) × 10; I/O cost = I/O per second × 2,628,000 seconds ÷ 1,000,000 × price per million. Aurora bills the data actually in the cluster volume rather than a pre-provisioned disk, but it does so in 10 GB increments, so the effective bill always rounds up. I/O is metered separately on Aurora Standard: converting a steady requests-per-second rate into a monthly figure needs the 2,628,000 seconds in a 730-hour month, which is why a modest-looking 800 IO/s becomes over two billion billable requests a month. The storage and I/O rates are editable defaults for us-east-1 — confirm current Aurora prices with AWS for your region.
The cluster volume no longer shrinks automatically after a large delete on older engine versions, so knowing the trajectory towards the 128 TiB ceiling — and the I/O bill that comes with it — is what tells you when to shard or archive.
This calculator takes 7 inputs: Cluster volume in use today, Growth, Plan ahead, Billing increment, Storage price, Storage I/O requests, I/O price. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.
Modern engine versions do reclaim space with dynamic resizing, but the reduction is asynchronous and never goes below the high-water mark within a maintenance window. Plan on the growth curve, not on the delete.