Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

This is beginning to feel like how it was when Intel was competing with AMD -- evolutionary improvements at first, which just kept on coming, increasing in size and impact, until AMD just faded out of the high-perf server market.

Sounds to me like they are not using EBS like RDS-MySQL would be..

I worked on and around Openstack for 18+ months. I think ignoring it is pretty safe to ignore at this point.

There might come along something that is actually good, but Openstack isn't it. The architecture is just bad, it will never be as reliable as something like AWS. (not because of scale, purely because of lack of error handling capabilities)

Reality is these sorts of orchestration systems need to be written by specialists. The vast majority of Openstack was written by people that admit they have no clue about systems level programming. This is what hype does, it forces a whole bunch of bad programming and architecture down everyones throats.

The marketecture and hype machine have done horrible things to Openstack. Not only have vendors riddled the thing with lockin and crap code that needs to be supported, but they have pushed entire projects that should have been shot in the head. cough Ceilometer cough

There is security, performance and plain availability problems everywhere, mostly embedded deep in the architecture.

Dumb decisions like "All systems must be Python" when Python is clearly not suited to a large number of the things they want to do is painful. As is the general "not invented here" syndrome and boys club that leads to certain libraries or patterns being pushed over others, usually to the peril of the project due to the 'blessed' thing being incomplete and unproven.

I don't intend on returning to Openstack if I can avoid it, unfortunately my skill-set does tend towards that sort of thing so we will see how I go.

> it's mostly commodity hardware

It's commodity in the sense that Amazon buys it from commodity vendors, but they use custom designs built to address the specific parameters of their data centers. Very few other companies can afford to employ an army of engineers to tweak every last component for optimal price-performance, nor for that matter do they have the benefit of accounting for a noticeable share of a supplier's revenue when entering the negotiations room.

> Smaller companies can and do offer much better pricing, they just don't have the marketing budget to convince you of it.

I am aware of at least one player (DigitalOcean) offering lower pricing than AWS, but that's only in a fairly limited niche. So while they may have the "economies" part checked they don't have the scale and scope to compete with Amazon on a particularly substantial level. I'd also be curious how they match up to Amazon in terms of operational efficiency since they lack many of the the advantages I listed here and in my previous post, which give AWS an edge in the race to zero as time passes.

I really don't think that this is a 1:1 comparison by any stretch. The Amazon offering, by being MySQL compatible gives you a migration strategy.

By comparison, look at Azure's DocumentDB or Search services both of which obscure the interfaces to the underlying ElasticSearch ensuring lock-in.

Honest,y both have value, but this really isn't the same by any stretch.