

Amazon RDS MySQL Now Starting at Just $19 a Month - pathdependent
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/06/amazon-rds-mysql-now-starting-at-19-month.html

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spudlyo
Not a fan of RDS. It has all the same drawbacks of using an EBS partition for
storage, but as far as I know you have no visibility (like await, iowat etc)
to know when your storage subsystem starts to flake out. EBS removes a lot of
Sysadmin & DBA headaches, but when you suddenly get mysterious DB stalls, good
luck trying to figure out what's wrong.

I've worked with some systems that used a software RAID10 array of EBS
volumes, and when a single EBS volume started to flake out, they'd just kick
it out of the array, and performance would improve. They'd then rebuild the
failed replica during off hours. If you're going to rely on EBS for DB storage
for anything in production, this seems like this is the way to go.

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cheatercheater
> you have no visibility (like await, iowat etc)

And you need this for the intended purpose _why_ exactly?

From the article:

> The t1.micro RDS instance is a low cost instance type designed for low
> traffic web applications, test applications and small projects

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true_religion
He's complaining about RDS in general, not this specifically priced offering
of it.

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cheatercheater
So what is he doing commenting on an article that talks about this specially
priced offering of it?

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mryan
The article about the new MacBook Pro line also included a discussion of Airs
and Mac Pros. Sometimes the discussion strays beyond the boundaries of the
headline.

Most of the time that is a good thing - I for one am interested in the point
the OP raised, which is that RDS (at all instance sizes) gives you no
visiblity in to what is happening under the covers on your DB server.

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icey
I would love a Postgres RDS option, and am somewhat surprised Amazon hasn't
offered one yet.

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newhouseb
Yeah, I have to wonder if there's an exclusivity agreement with the Oracle
licensing in RDS that requires that MySQL and Oracle be the only options for
linux databases.

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mark_l_watson
About $8.60/month with a 3 year buy in. Not bad.

I will try one for a few weeks and see what kind of performance it provides.

I was hoping that Heroku's new PostgreSQL service would be a good option for a
hosted easy to use database but I have lots of small projects and Heroku's
offerings are per database not per virtualized database server.

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notatoad
I could potentially use a hosted postgres solution, i just tried to go to
heroku's site to look at what they've got. their homepage is currently an
error message saying "no application is configured for this hostname". That
certainly inspires confidence.

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jaredstenquist
This is a great update. You certainly don't want to put anything production on
here, but small applications would be great with this. Even a properly cached
WP blog (low traffic) would do just fine on here.

The automatic backups and rollback in RDS is worth way more than $19 alone.

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jetsnoc
I sure wish they would allow the slaving of RDS instances to non-RDS instances
(aka CHANGE MASTER TO). I would love to host a MySQL slave at Amazon AWS.

Sure, I can get this done with an EC2 instance but how killer would a "DR
slave" with rollbacks and automatic backup features be? Besides feature-sets I
could eliminate quite a few delayed replication nodes and dedicated DR servers
at hosted providers if they would offer this feature.

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zeruch
This is actually a small example of how Amazon keeps being aggressively
competitive by making the pricepoint almost impossible for anyone else to
match at scale.

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regularfry
That's exactly backwards. Amazon are expensive; they're fighting on features,
not price.

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acdha
That's an odd way to restate what the original poster said. Your argument
appears to be the tautology that AWS is expensive when compared to different
services which do less.

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regularfry
First, that's not a tautology. Second, that's not my point. The OP is wrong in
saying that Amazon are being price-competitive. That's not their strategy; you
can see it by comparing their VM costs to just about anyone else out there.
Amazon's strategy is to out-feature everyone and lock customers in precisely
so that they don't have to compete on price.

~~~
acdha
It is the definition of a tautology: you're both saying the same thing but
from different directions. AWS is trying to avoid room for equivalent
services, not services which do less: they don't want a customer who's
sensitive to $2/month but they do want people to say “ops is expensive, let's
save our people for non-commodity jobs”

Also, those cost comparisons almost universally compare spot pricing rather
than reserved. If you run the numbers seriously AWS is not the bargain
basement leader but it's a lot more even than the contrarian blog echo chamber
would have you believe, particularly if you have bursty workloads, use some of
their other offerings and/or need servers outside of the US/Europe.

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johnnytee
Looks like you can get it cheaper than $19 if you get a reserved instance.

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robryan
Currently for one of my sites we have the web server and MySQL database on one
medium instance. I assume performance would be a lot worse on a micro rds and
same web box?

