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Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#51

Post by loco77 »

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…

The interface is MySQL, no shortage of alternative implementations... Did Microsoft open source SQL Server?? How about the source code for ANY of their cloud services? They are ALL proprietary.

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#52

Post by EGreg »

chuhnk wrote: post #50
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 complete…

Of course Amazon wants vendor lock-in. Their whole business model is about being a marketplace. Do you want them to open-source their shopping cart software?

And in Amazon Web Services, the biggest thing Amazon has to fear is the OpenStack initiative producing a platform that lots of little hosts can host.

At the same time, Amazon is stock market time bomb that will either start extracting monopoly rents and draw regulatory ire, or whose stock will drop, because of the amount of revenue multiples.

That said ... this is the way it nearly always works. Microsoft invented .NET over 10 years ago, and has kept it proprietary, leveraging the dominance of Windows, extracting rents. Now that Mobile is the new hotness and Microsoft needs to catch up, it goes open source. Google released Android for the same reason.

In short ... the companies that devote a lot of resources to R&D usually like to recoup the costs, but eventually PLATFORMS get opened. Frankly, the world benefits more when this happens sooner (Netscape open sources its codebase, the Web is designed, etc.) but the engine of progress in capitalism is still speculative investment, and that needs to pay off for years before the public at large can benefit, if investors are to continue investing.

Once we switch to crowdfunding, however, this model of capitalism and risktaking may be disrupted as well.

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#53

Post by fizx »

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.

It must introduce a millisecond or two of latency b/c cross-AZ quorums aren't free. That will likely be trumped by whatever differences in implementation quality exist between mysql and aurora.

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#54

Post by t1m »

state_machine wrote: post #3

“Aurora" is already the name of a cloud infrastructure management product, an open-souce apache project no less: http://aurora.incubator.apache.org/ Using an existing name for a product in a similar space is just confusing and hurts everyone.

Michael Stonebraker created a database called Aurora more than 10 years ago.

http://cs.brown.edu/research/aurora/

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#55

Post by sciurus »

brendangregg wrote: post #35
sciurus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is what they claim in the FAQ: "Amazon Aurora delivers significant increases over MySQL performance by tightly integrating the database engine with an SSD-based virtualized storage layer purpose-built for database workloads, reducing writes to the storage system, minimizing lock contention and eliminating delays created by database process threads. Our tests with SysBench show that Amazon Aurora delivers over 50…

I'd love to see more details (active benchmarking). At the very least, what is the CPU and disk utilization during the benchmark? It'll shed some light on how this was done: a 5x improvement in cycles per query? Or better caching? People will benchmark this themselves ASAP. If you do, try to include some basic system metrics. The output of "vmstat 10", "iostat -x 10", and some "pidstat -t 1" would be a great start. T…

To get the most comparable hardware setup for the comparison, I think you would want to run both Aurora and MySQL via RDS. RDS does not give you access to the underling EC2 instance, just to metrics via Cloudwatch.

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#56

Post by cjg_ »

zippergz wrote: post #45
cjg_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you need a smaller instance you are probably fine with regular MySQL instance though.

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#57

Post by cjg_ »

meritt wrote: post #44
cjg_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Good question.

"Storage consumed by your database, up to 64 TB, is billed at $0.10 a GB per month and IOs consumed by your database are billed at $0.20 per million requests"

Sounds like the replication is included in this, but Amazon really should clarify that.

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#58

Post by arnehormann »

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.

MariaDB enabled Cassandra as a storage engine: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/documentation/storage-engi...

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#59

Post by jcampbell1 »

frozenport wrote: post #46
Xorlev wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With a database that small, performance shouldn't ever be noticeable. Are you running the DB on EBS?

1) If you are having trouble with tweaking my.cnf, give the perl script `mysqltuner` a go. It is pretty good.

2) The biggest improvement would be moving the storage to SSDs. I personally prefer Linode to DO, but both are cheap, and good.

My linode servers can do full text non-blocking backups at about 100MB per second, so depending on your outage recovery requirement, you may be able to get away with a simple cron job.

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#60

Post by mallipeddi »

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…

Amazon is way ahead of everyone else in the cloud space. Their closest rivals (Microsoft & Google) are pretty much copying AWS. Most of Azure's services are equally proprietary and I doubt that will ever change.

This just leaves the other smaller players (DigitalOcean, Joyent, Rackspace, etc) who are mostly offering something akin to EC2 and then partnering with other vendors to offer the missing pieces on top (frankly what other choice do they have? They can't get into a race with Amazon/Google on who can build the most no. of services - they will never win that race).

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