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Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#41

Post by zippergz »

ssharp wrote: post #31
zippergz wrote: post #11

Has anyone been able to find specific pricing on this? All of the language I've seen about it has been vague. One of the things that's kept me from using RDS for toy projects is that it basically amounts to running another instance on top of what I already have. For a "real" project, that's a drop in the bucket, but for toys and prototypes, it can be a significant chunk of the cost (so I usually end up just running m…

I'd think for most toy projects, running more than an EC2 instance or two is overkill. At least in my experiences, running the full stack on a single server works well enough for most hobby projects. I certainly don't want to spend $7 a day playing around with RDS for fun!

Definitely. But one of the nice things about a lot of the AWS stuff is that you can build on the same infrastructure you'd use if you wanted to scale up. So if you have a toy project that ends up being more successful than you expect, it's pretty easy to just add resources. For example, DynamoDB is ultra cheap for the lowest usage levels, but simply by reserving more capacity you can scale up with absolutely no changes to your app. Makes it easy to prototype or play on the real system and not have to re-do your work later if the project becomes more than a toy.

I guess since this is MySQL-compatible it wouldn't be that hard to migrate from MySQL to Aurora, other than moving the data...

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#42

Post by jakozaur »

dschiptsov wrote: post #37

So, this is a Xen VPS (Amazon uses Xen as far as I remeber) with a MySQL 5.6 database, with a custom storage engine that stores data in some Dynamo-based storage. Any code could access it via MySQL protocol (bindings to libmysqlclient.so). Fine.

I appreciate your technical insight, but glueing those technologies together is far from trivial. Making it easily to manage and reliable is even harder.

I trust your best intention, but even Dropbox was dismissed on HN as user-friendly rsync.

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#44

Post by meritt »

cjg_ wrote: post #43
zippergz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch. Thanks.

Just slightly more expensive than the same instance with MySQL on RDS ($0.24)

Yes but "Storage is automatically replicated across three AWS Availability Zones (AZs) for durability and high availability, with two copies of the data in each Availability Zone."

Is that included in the server cost? Or will you actually be paying ~3x the server + storage costs?

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#45

Post by zippergz »

cjg_ wrote: post #43
zippergz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch. Thanks.

Just slightly more expensive than the same instance with MySQL on RDS ($0.24)

Right, but you can also get much smaller MySQL instances. It's not necessarily an "ouch" given the capacity, but it is in combination with the fact that there are no smaller instance types.

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#46

Post by frozenport »

Xorlev wrote: post #40
frozenport wrote: post #27

Does this introduce more latency compared to running a LAMPs stack on EC2 or does it target larger databases? My database is about 300 megabytes.

You probably aren't the target audience if your database fits in RAM.

You can see notable changes in performance if your database gets fragmented, and tweaking the .my.cnf script seems like a massive distraction from my actual work. Having somebody handle these and improve performance for long queries would be wonderful.

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#47

Post by freshflowers »

Cieplak wrote: post #39
jasondc wrote: post #28

I think the problem AWS is seeing is how they are being commoditized (e.g. you can just run your database on the cheapest hosting provider), so profits will move towards 0. They will need to add more services like this (Aurora, DynamoDB, etc.) to ensure AWS isn't a commodity (and you can't just easily switch to DigitalOcean).

I think that the AWS vendor lock-in won't come from single features such as databases from specific vendors, but rather the ecosystem of Route53, elastic load balancers, S3, EBS, AMIs, Glacier, RDS, CloudFormation templates, SQS, security groups, libraries like boto, auto scaling groups, and everything else besides instance provisioning. Of course you can implement most of these yourself, e.g., HAProxy for ELBs, rabb…

So far I've been able to avoid vendor lock-in on the code level (besides S3, but the S3 API is simple and has become pretty much a standard for object storage).

On the infrastructure level, the "lock-in" part is not so much the technology, all of that is relatively easy to replace. But it would take me two additional FTE's to configure and manage everything AWS offers as a service ourselves.

But that applies to a lot of things these days, AWS just happens to be a one stop shop for a growing range of commodity services.

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#48

Post by dschiptsov »

jakozaur wrote: post #42
dschiptsov wrote: post #37

So, this is a Xen VPS (Amazon uses Xen as far as I remeber) with a MySQL 5.6 database, with a custom storage engine that stores data in some Dynamo-based storage. Any code could access it via MySQL protocol (bindings to libmysqlclient.so). Fine.

I appreciate your technical insight, but glueing those technologies together is far from trivial. Making it easily to manage and reliable is even harder. I trust your best intention, but even Dropbox was dismissed on HN as user-friendly rsync.

OK, perhaps they wrote a MySQL-Dynamo (or whatever it is) wire-protocol translation engine, and do not use MySQL server. But custom storage engine looks like most natural way.

We will see it shortly.)

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#49

Post by bcantrill »

(Disclaimer: I work for an AWS competitor.)

To me, there is a very interesting contrast to be had between this announcement and Microsoft's announcement: it feels like Microsoft is discovering the business value of being open at the same time that Amazon is living in the time warp of proprietary everything. Has Microsoft internalized that open source is (or can be) a differentiator in the cloud? Amazon is clearly still oblivious to it -- and it will be very interesting to see if this service generates fear of vendor lock-in...

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#50

Post by chuhnk »

bcantrill wrote: post #49

(Disclaimer: I work for an AWS competitor.) To me, there is a very interesting contrast to be had between this announcement and Microsoft's announcement: it feels like Microsoft is discovering the business value of being open at the same time that Amazon is living in the time warp of proprietary everything. Has Microsoft internalized that open source is (or can be) a differentiator in the cloud? Amazon is clearly sti…

I have to agree with this. Amazon sees the competitive landscape and their move is to attempt to create some form of vendor lock-in by providing the services that their customers have asked for or are probably hosting themselves. This is by no means a bad move and will result in holding on to a lot more customers as well as creating new revenue streams from those services. For someone like myself however, it completely turns me off the AWS path. I will use AWS as a compute resource, as well as any other cloud provider. They will fight a battle for profit while compute costs continue to come down allowing me to reap the benefits while building a cloud agnostic stack.
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