11–20 of 101 posts
Honest question, why not just use dynamodb? If I'm already mostly server less and AWS, dynamodb seems like a natural choice for a persistent store in a world where cost and zero-scaling is important.
Aurora Postgres is an interesting product where AWS made significant changes to Postgres storage architecture, however it has a fairly high fixed cost. It seems in many cases RDS Postgres is cheaper and even when using Aurora, using fixed-size instance classes instead of "serverless" autoscaling classes (with ACUs) is a lot cheaper. Fixed Aurora on-demand instances are roughly 17% the cost of ACUs. Fixed instances ar…
The term "serverless" is so confusing if to me. I had settled on "scale to zero" as my chosen definition for it, because it was the only definition that truly made sense to me and that I very strongly valued. Apparently AWS don't think it means that. I guess it just means "you'll never have to SSH in and upgrade anything"? The other thing that surprises me here is that one of AWS's biggest selling points is how rarel…
They claim 99.99% availability or whatever the figure is, that it’s self healing, allows up to 2 replicas to be down for write availability and 3 replicas to be down for read availability. They promise “millisecond consistency”, whatever that even means.
Some of the blogs mention that they use distributed state to extract slivers of consistency across the nodes, which is just scary stuff to hear.
I’m seeing more and more usage of Aurora due to the magical component it offers, but I can’t wrap my head around what it’s actually supposed to be, and what the failure model is, like I can with RDS PG and MySQL.
They are end of lifing v1, which could go to zero. V2 can't. Are there any truly serverless SQL databases out there?
The term "serverless" is so confusing if to me. I had settled on "scale to zero" as my chosen definition for it, because it was the only definition that truly made sense to me and that I very strongly valued. Apparently AWS don't think it means that. I guess it just means "you'll never have to SSH in and upgrade anything"? The other thing that surprises me here is that one of AWS's biggest selling points is how rarel…
You manage purely logical containers like databases and tables, the serverless service takes care of the logical to physical mapping. This lets them get better density, manage patching scaling, and a ton of other things
Reminder that AWS Aurora claims to have broken the CAP theorem. The literature doesn’t clarify whether they are consistent or available, and when you ask AWS directly, they tell you the CAP theorem isn’t relevant due to the way Aurora is built. They claim 99.99% availability or whatever the figure is, that it’s self healing, allows up to 2 replicas to be down for write availability and 3 replicas to be down for read…
Reminder that AWS Aurora claims to have broken the CAP theorem. The literature doesn’t clarify whether they are consistent or available, and when you ask AWS directly, they tell you the CAP theorem isn’t relevant due to the way Aurora is built. They claim 99.99% availability or whatever the figure is, that it’s self healing, allows up to 2 replicas to be down for write availability and 3 replicas to be down for read…
Reminder that AWS Aurora claims to have broken the CAP theorem. The literature doesn’t clarify whether they are consistent or available, and when you ask AWS directly, they tell you the CAP theorem isn’t relevant due to the way Aurora is built. They claim 99.99% availability or whatever the figure is, that it’s self healing, allows up to 2 replicas to be down for write availability and 3 replicas to be down for read…
Can’t you bypass CAP if you just have a ton of compute in the background handling all of these tasks in real time? Aurora isn’t just some binary running on ec2 it’s probably 10 different things going on
CP means you can’t be available, meaning your system will stop replying to queries.
AP means you’re always available, but you could receive stale data when querying.
It’s irrelevant whether it’s a single binary running on EC2 or a billion services working in unison. It’s a property of the system.
The term "serverless" is so confusing if to me. I had settled on "scale to zero" as my chosen definition for it, because it was the only definition that truly made sense to me and that I very strongly valued. Apparently AWS don't think it means that. I guess it just means "you'll never have to SSH in and upgrade anything"? The other thing that surprises me here is that one of AWS's biggest selling points is how rarel…
Serverless is a paradigm where you pay for capacity, not for a specific number of instances. It's extending "cattle, not pets" beyond VMs to databases. In theory it provides better incentives for both parties: Customers don't have to pick instance size, etc. to try and accomodate their workload. They can buy throughput, etc. in fractions of an actual instance. They can look at their quota usage to determine whether t…