

Amazon Relational Database Service - timf
http://aws.amazon.com/rds/

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jbyers
It's been said here many times before: if you are an AWS value-add startup,
watch out. Their march up the value chain is relentless.

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hyperbovine
What does that mean?

In particular, what does that mean for everyone's favorite baby Dropbox?

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hendler
Dropbox makes desktop software and a web interface to cloud storage and
shouldn't be affected negatively by new cloud services.

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kungfooey
I think the kind of company he's referring to would be something like
RightScale.

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rantfoil
This is pretty cool, but for a startup at scale it still makes way more sense
to own / operate on your own. For instance for a quadruple extra large
instance (68GB) it would cost about $27k a year. Considering you'll want to do
master-master for uptime, that's $60k out the door every year for two of these
bad boys.

Vs owning it... can get a decent dual master setup for a fraction of that.

~~~
StarLite
Owning it is only part of the equation, think about hosting (you dont want to
host your servers in your house on a DSL line), power usage (those bad boys
will use a _lot_ more then your desktop PC), cooling (they tend to get warm),
backup solutions (an extra server, tape-libraries etc), maintenance (your
super servers will break down at times) etc.

$60K a year is peanuts for most companies.

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tibbon
I'm facing this right now.

I just bought 6 1U servers for almost nothing for one of the companies I work
with, and now we have to figure out where to put them. We had a free 1U rack
space before, but we're unsure if we'll be able to get 6U of space for free.

If not, CoLo spots aren't all that cheap. Putting them in someone's house
isn't an option and we don't have much money.

Sure we had the money to buy the servers (some were $100/each used from
another company that was switching to EC2)- but I don't have 100's/month for
racking each of them nearby. We're a super-small company without much capital
and zero investment right now. Totally bootstrapped and paying for stuff via
consulting. There's no way in hell we have a 60K budget and if we bring in
that much total in the next 9 months I'd be happy.

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patrickgzill
Go to webhostingtalk.com and look around. There are places that will host 1U
for $50 each including bandwidth and remote reboot support.

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tibbon
Thanks! I was talking to a friend that runs a small CoLo and it was looking
like $200-400/month for each server, depending on options.

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mattjung
I am really impressed by all those nifty moves Amazon has made in the last
three years to become the major cloud infrastructure provider (I would have
expected it from Google). Every step makes completely sense. They were able to
reinvent themselves, something very rare for economic giants...

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snewe
I wonder how:

<http://fathomdb.com/about/home>

will respond.

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jpcx01
Benchmarks. Show themselves significantly faster and more configurable (finely
tuned via software) and people will pay.

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staunch
I suspect most people would rather use an official thing directly from Amazon,
rather than a marginally (or even significantly) better thing from someone
they've never heard of.

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clemesha
What an awesome step forward. Just the thought of less and less
System/Database Admin stuff, and more time to create apps is very exciting.

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tom_b
How much less db admin stuff, other than backup and patching, are you actually
getting out of here?

I tend to spend most of my time as an application dba (doing schema design and
SQL programming using lots of analytical functions for data warehouse apps).
So I spend more time doing dba type work analyzing access plans and examining
physical storage than mucking around with backups - of course, data warehouses
are somewhat forgiving in the backup space since you can usually (if somewhat
painfully) reload staged source data if things go completely south.

Looks like a cool service (although maybe postgres would have made me happier
than MySQL here) other than that.

Besides, I like all that DBA stuff - it _is_ part of creating apps.

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sanswork
Amazon constantly impresses me with their AWS offerings and improvements. It's
really refreshing to see them continue to build and improve their services so
rapidly. Sometimes it seems there is a new feature or announcement every week.

Now they just need to open that west coast datacenter. :)

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mark_l_watson
I spent 2 ours this morning playing with RDS - not really a waste of time
since I deploy most of my customer's projects to EC2, etc. Sort-of kicking the
tires.

Anyway, it is easy to use, and not having to deal yourself with failure
recover, managing a EBS volume if you run MySQL yourself, etc. makes it look
like a good service once it comes out of beta.

A few things: right now, you can't pay a reservation fee to get the really
cheap EC2 rates. (Basically RDS is a managed-for-your EC2+EBS.) Also, it would
be great if they also support PostgreSQL.

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gfodor
Cool, but sad they went with MySQL instead of PostgreSQL. Can't blame them
though.

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c00p3r
MySQL had more hype.

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waldrews
Does anyone have a sense of what the ACID properties of this setup are,
especially under replication?

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fookyong
this is kind of a big deal.

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cperciva
It's not as big as it sounds -- this isn't a scalable relational database
service. As far as I can see, this is just EC2 instances with mysql
preinstalled.

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timf
While it does run as an instance (looks like you don't get shell access), they
provide new native API calls for adding and removing nodes on demand, and they
will maintain the stack and backups for you. And in the future, API calls for
automatically putting replicated DBs across availability zones.

I would be less interested in it if it was not as a standalone instance per
customer. Can you imagine having someone with a valid account into a shared
MySQL server (and a stolen credit card) poking around all day? (especially on
MySQL vulnerability announcement days)

~~~
cperciva
_I would be less interested in it if it was not as a standalone instance per
customer._

I absolutely agree. My point was just that this seems to be Amazon wrapping up
their existing service in a way which is easier to use and more marketable,
rather than actually releasing something _new_. (Not that there is anything
wrong with this, of course -- I'm sure there are many people who don't want to
be bothered with figuring out how to get MySQL configured on EC2.)

~~~
timf
I agree RDS is on the lower end of novelty and excitement... And once you have
VMs and a network, what could be considered truly new? Was EBS new? We can
create a clustered filesystem with GNBD exports without Amazon's help, too.

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seldo
I can see why they chose MySQL, but I would gladly pay for Oracle in the cloud
as well. Plus, Oracle can scale up to a much bigger machine before you have to
start scaling horizontally.

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catch23
I'm not sure why they chose MySQL. Does mysql still scale linearly up to 8
cores? I figured most people who need 8 cores for mysql would have already
gone to sharding or partitioning.

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WALoeIII
5.1 scales better, and I would bet they're looking into XtraDB (if not already
using it) which will go even further on multi-core machines.

 _edit_ \- 5.1 (recent releases) scales better mostly due to InnoDB 1.0.4
which incorporates a number of patches from Google (Mark Callagan), Percona
and more.

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catch23
but still, it doesn't scale as linearly as other databases like Oracle or
PostgreSQL. Even compared against MySQL 5.1, PostgreSQL scales linearly all
the way up to 128 cores -- so it seems like for big databases, you'd want to
use something that can actually utilize all 128 cores.

I'm pretty sure they're using MySQL because it's popular, not because it
scales. I figure when people hit 10 million rows in a MySQL table, they start
looking at sharding/partitioning instead of buying a bigger machine.

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spudlyo
MySQL scales for reads pretty well since it has a well understood and mature
replication system. In contrast, the PostgreSQL replication landscape is
somewhat muddy. Scaling writes is a challenge of course, and PostgreSQL might
be the better choice there for getting the most out of big hardware. Scaling
up can really cost though, as the price-to-performance ratio gets outside of
the sweet spot when the hardware you're buying gets more exotic.

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catch23
I'm not debating which database scales better. I'm questioning why anyone
would use a "big" server for mysql. If you're going to do replication with
mysql, you don't need 10 servers with 68 gigs of memory -- you'd probably be
better off with 100 servers with 4 gigs of memory.

However, if you're going to go with "big" database servers, one should use
Oracle or PostgreSQL since they can actually make use of the memory & cpu
cores.

~~~
spudlyo
Any 64-bit MySQL will do fine with big memory. It is with > 16 cores that
modern MySQL suffers from concurrency problems with mutex contention. These
AMZN big memory instances have 4/8 cores, well within the area where MySQL
performs well.

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izak30
I've been playing with this while it's been in private beta. It's good, and
works just like EC2, but for DB

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jpcx01
Looking forward to some benchmarks. If its fast enough, this'll make me switch
over to EC2.

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JoeAltmaier
Particularly latency benchmarks. Quick enough for web-commerce isn't the same
as quick enough for collaboration for instance.

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sant0sk1
Doesn't Amazon realize we don't need no SQL? Spluh! _(sarcasm - this is cool)_

~~~
timf
<http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/>

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tybris
Too expensive for me.

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JoeAltmaier
If you don't value your time, it is expensive. If you already have some
bricks-and-mortar, it is certainly expensive as an increment to what you have.
But to me and my startup, its heaven-sent, because it saves two of my
commodities that I have to strictly ration: my effort, and calendar time.

