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It's an annoying marketing term, sure enough, but the ideas it names aren't terrible. It's not always a mistake to pay someone else to take care of maintenance,

It's an annoying marketing term, sure enough, but the ideas it names aren't terrible. It's not always a mistake to pay someone else to take care of maintenance, scaling and security. Perhaps managed service would be better?

baddox 7y ago
It’s more than just a managed service. RDS is Amazon’s managed database cloud service, but you still provision and pay for a specific virtual server with a certain number of CPUs and amount of RAM. “Serverless” generally implies that you do not provision any server hardware (even virtual) and instead only provide application code.
- MaxBarraclough 7y ago
  I see your point, but we could view that as a quirk of the way they handle billing. If the instance fails, you're insulated from that, right?
  - baddox 7y ago
    I’m no expert, but I think you run RDS on an EC2 instance, so it’s basically just a normal virtual server running Amazon’s managed version of the RDBMS. I’m not sure what happens if an instance “fails” but I assume you can have downtime if Amazon needs to move your VM, just like EC2, but I assume Amazon handles moving the instance and restarting it.
    - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
      > I think you run RDS on an EC2 instance, so it’s basically just a normal virtual server running Amazon’s managed version of the RDBMS Yes I think that's right. That is to say, it doesn't give you replication. > I’m not sure what happens if an instance “fails” but I assume you can have downtime if Amazon needs to move your VM, just like EC2, but I assume Amazon handles moving the instance and restarting it. No need for the quotation marks, that's the correct terminology. Your suspicions seem to be right on - it looks like RDS handles instance-failure for you, with non-trivial downtime, but no data-loss. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/amazon-rds-under-the-hood-single-az-instance-recovery/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/amazon-rds-under-the-h...

baddox 7y ago

It’s more than just a managed service. RDS is Amazon’s managed database cloud service, but you still provision and pay for a specific virtual server with a certain number of CPUs and amount of RAM. “Serverless” generally implies that you do not provision any server hardware (even virtual) and instead only provide application code.

MaxBarraclough 7y ago
I see your point, but we could view that as a quirk of the way they handle billing. If the instance fails, you're insulated from that, right?
- baddox 7y ago
  I’m no expert, but I think you run RDS on an EC2 instance, so it’s basically just a normal virtual server running Amazon’s managed version of the RDBMS. I’m not sure what happens if an instance “fails” but I assume you can have downtime if Amazon needs to move your VM, just like EC2, but I assume Amazon handles moving the instance and restarting it.
  - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
    > I think you run RDS on an EC2 instance, so it’s basically just a normal virtual server running Amazon’s managed version of the RDBMS Yes I think that's right. That is to say, it doesn't give you replication. > I’m not sure what happens if an instance “fails” but I assume you can have downtime if Amazon needs to move your VM, just like EC2, but I assume Amazon handles moving the instance and restarting it. No need for the quotation marks, that's the correct terminology. Your suspicions seem to be right on - it looks like RDS handles instance-failure for you, with non-trivial downtime, but no data-loss. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/amazon-rds-under-the-hood-single-az-instance-recovery/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/amazon-rds-under-the-h...