

Amazon Aurora - tobltobs
https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/details/

======
petewailes
Relevant: we're evaluating Aurora as a storage mechanism for our software.
Currently we're MariaDB.

Quick thoughts: speedy, nice throughput, good read/write speeds generally, but
the query optimiser still needs some work.

More detail...

So, it's a pretty nice engine. Scales well, seems fairly bullet proof. You can
alter instances and they go up and down in size nicely, reboots are handled
gracefully (although it doesn't seem to give estimated timings, which is a
mild irritation).

The optimiser seems to get a bit stuck on understanding what indexes to use
for queries that involve multiple joins or more complex data structures. My
guess is that this is because under it (from what I understand), it's
basically DynamoDB with clever bells and whistles (if someone knows more or
that that's incorrect, please feel free to jump in). Mostly though, it's
quicker for the majority of queries.

Backup management is lovely, caching system seems pretty performant from
current benchmarking.

The metrics panel is also pretty sweet for monitoring the things that you're
going to care about in DB-land.

I'd say if you're running something sensible sized, and your data is
relational but not massively complex, it's a pretty solid solution which I'm
sure will only improve over time. That said, there are a few edge cases where
you're going to have to do some work on your queries to make sure they still
behave in a timely manner. Mostly, if you're using an ORM, this is where I
suspect you're going to get some pain.

Any questions on specifics, feel free to fire away and I'll elaborate where I
can.

~~~
gigq
I haven't used it but I did attend the talk on it at the AWS conference when
it was announced.

It is not using DynamoDB under the covers. It basically uses a fork of MySQL
for the front end and their own storage layer built from scratch on the
backend. It does use concepts from the Dynamo white paper for redundantly
storing the data to disk which removes the need for MySQL style replication.
But it's not using the DynamoDB service currently offered from Amazon.

------
ceejayoz
Released two days ago, and discussed here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9959579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9959579)

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rubiquity
Now all Amazon needs to do is make Aurora HIPAA compliant/offer to sign a BAA
and the dump trucks full of money will be backing up in no time. Can I dream?

~~~
chimeracoder
> Now all Amazon needs to do is make Aurora HIPAA compliant/offer to sign a
> BAA and the dump trucks full of money will be backing up in no time. Can I
> dream?

Amazon already signs BAAs that cover EC2 dedicated instances and S3. Or do you
mean BAAs that cover Aurora specifically?

FWIW, unless you're already a rather large company with excess capacity in
_both_ the engineering and legal teams, I'd recommend skipping AWS entirely
and using a company like Aptible (YC S'14) to handle hosting and
compliance[0]. It's more or less like using Heroku, except you have all of the
compliance requirements (including legal documentation) managed for you.
Having tried both approaches myself, I can testify that the latter is by far
the preferable alternative (and honestly cheaper in the long run).

[0] Like Heroku, Aptible uses AWS under the hood, so it's not really
"skipping" AWS, but you never have to deal with it directly (and that's a good
thing).

~~~
rubiquity
I was referring to Aurora (or any RDS product for that matter) specifically.

~~~
awgupta
RDS just cleared HIPAA and BAA. See here:
[http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-
compliance/](http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/)

Working on Aurora...

~~~
rubiquity
Awesome! I must have missed that announcement. Thank you.

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Phr34Ck
too desperate for imaginary points you couldn't wait more than 2 days?

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toomuchtodo
dang: can this get merged into the old thread ceejayoz mentions?

Not sure if HN has the logic to be able to detect identical posts and reject
or merge automagically.

