> Yes Aurora Serverless is a distinct offering.

Again, you're quite (and patently) wrong. Aurora Serverless is quite bluntly a configuration of AWS Aurora to add autoscaling to AWS Aurora instances.

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide...

> Aurora Serverless autoscales - just like lambda.

If you're confused to the point of confounding autoscaling with serverless then I'm afraid there is no point to continue this discussion. You're just underlining the fact that "serverless" is a fad being mindlessly disseminated by clueless proponents.

Well, no I’m not “patently wrong”. Aurora Serverless has limitations and features that are not available with Aurora. This includes lacking the ability to load and unload from S3 and it has the “Data API” which lets you use APIs to interact with the database instead of your typical database connections. This feature is not available with regular Aurora. It was implemented specifically for Serverless workloads so your lambda doesn’t have to “run inside your VPC” since that increases the cold start times.

We specifically could not use Aurora Serverless for our ETL jobs because of the lack of integration with S3

Again there is a difference between reading documentation and actually using it.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide...

I’m also not confounding “Autoscaling” and services. Being able to scale on demand and “scale down to zero” is one of the parts of how Serverless is defined.