
Using AWS EC2 instance store vs EBS for MySQL - ngaut
https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/08/20/using-aws-ec2-instance-store-vs-ebs-for-mysql-how-to-increase-performance-and-decrease-cost/
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pjungwir
Oh, running databases on instance storage is one of my favorite topics! :-)

Here is the start of a chain of comments where you'll find some interesting
ideas and alternatives:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098783)
(It is just amazing who is on HN....)

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nimos
Doesn't really seem like a fair comparison since it relies on compression for
the local storage to be cheaper. Comparing similarly sized EBS volumes + EC2
instance to the local storage instances and it is pretty much the exact same
cost.

Obviously local NVMe is going to smoke a networked replicated drive
performance wise but that comes with it's own set of trade offs.

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jpitz
The whole premise of the article is avoiding IO stalls on large EBS volumes.

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chx
Is Amazon AWS the new reality distortion field? Gosh, just rent two dedicated
boxes, one master, one slave, switch over to slave manually in the extreme
rare case if the master fails and be done. This entire article screams "right
tool for the job _and this is not the right tool_ ".

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eithed
While I agree with you, "switch over to slave manually" just doesn't seem
right. Who would monitor when to switch? Why would somebody want to monitor
that? Having said that - there're probably solutions that allow switching when
database is waiting for I/O

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tkyjonathan
RDS doesn't fail over to a slave anyway. You would need to do that manually.

If you mean 'I ticked the multi-az box' that is only in the even that the AWS
datacenter crashes - it will move RDS for you to another zone. If you have
services that cache ip addresses from DNS, you will need to rediscover the
database.

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hayd
It's strange not to mention vanilla RDS (only Aurora is mentioned). Is RDS
much more expensive?

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some_account
I was looking into it a bit before. The smallest RDS instance was like 11
dollars per month and can't use spot instances (naturally).

If you do use spot instance with a local postgres on EBS, it comes down to
about 4 dollars per month all together. With instance store, that should be
around 3 dollars.

These are for t2 micro. If you use bigger instances, the money difference will
be huge.

RDS is just way too expensive for small projects.

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dpeck
$11/month is too expensive for a small project?

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some_account
It's my private project of trying to build an interesting browser plug-in
using aws services. I want to keep the costs super low since I need it running
all the time but will only use a handful of computers running my plugins while
developing.

I do it partly to learn about aws features, partly because I would like if
this plug-in existed myself and it doesn't :)

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some_account
I really think Amazon should come out with a local disk option that uses local
attached disks that can survive stopping an instance.

You would reserve parts of that local physical disk on the host for your
instance.

~~~
chillydawg
I think the reason they don't is not to let you get into bad habits of
assuming disks and vms don't fail.

