[tl;dr: Serverless provisioning for data is far from a new concept, but it wasn't called "serverless" before serverless compute (functions) appeared. OP probabl

[tl;dr: Serverless provisioning for data is far from a new concept, but it wasn't called "serverless" before serverless compute (functions) appeared. OP probably meant that Aurora was the first serverless SQL database, but even that statement is debatable.] It probably avoids recognition because it was tied to App Engine, which wasn't serverless by itself, and predated the popularization of the term serverless. I can identify a few other serverless NoSQL databases that predated the serverless hype: Azure Storage Tables and CosmosDB (known as DocumentDB back when it was released in 2014) for one. I haven't used DynamoDB back then, but it seems like it was also serverless from day one[1]. I think the author really wanted to say "Serverless SQL databases are not a new thing. AWS launched Aurora back in 2017 [...]". That might check out if you don't count Cloud Spanner as "true" SQL[2], but I'm wouldn't be surprised if you'd find someone who has implemented a niche SQL database service that wasn't provisioned and kinda supported scaling up as needed. [1] "Amazon DynamoDB lets you specify the request throughput you want your table to be able to achieve (your table’s “throughput capacity”). Behind the scenes, the service handles the provisioning of resources to achieve the requested throughput rate. Rather than asking you to think about instances, hardware, memory, and other factors that could affect your throughput rate, we simply ask you to provision the throughput level you want to achieve and we handle the rest." [2] Amazon only launched Aurora on 2018, even though they announced it in late 2018. Cloud Spanner was released a full year before, and Spanner was running internally on Google datacenters, possibly with serverless provisioning, since 2012.