5 ms·

For your application though a failure is a failure in any scenario. EBS went down in one zone and was slow in a couple others for a few hours, it's a bad downti

For your application though a failure is a failure in any scenario. EBS went down in one zone and was slow in a couple others for a few hours, it's a bad downtime but some services survived the problem relatively unscathed. This suggests that something could have been done to avoid any trouble at all. If the datacenter you are in has a slight conditioning problem this summer and 10% of your drives breaks down due to excessive heat, how quickly will you be able to re-provision the data center? About a week after AWS outage the italian ISP Aruba had a UPS failure due to a fire in the UPS room and the entire datacenter switched off automatically during the night. For the following 8 hours that datacenter was off for every customer. How would your new solution handle such a situation? Designing a hot standby replication solution for MySQL/PostgreSQL that works across regions seems easier to me rather than implementing a database from scratch that should solve a very complex problem.

justinsb 15y ago
Certainly it is possible to engineer a hot standby solution for MySQL databases using DRBD, or synchronous replication etc. There's a choice between engineering an endless series of fixes like that, or re-examining the problem space and building a new database. After years of doing the former, we chose to examine the latter, and we're seeing good indications from that approach.
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  I have misgivings because you are not the first to try and re-examine the problem space. A lot of the endless series of fixes have arisen from just such attempts. I want you to succeed, but you're dealing with seriously hairy deep magic issues that the best minds in the industry and academia have been chipping away at for decades.
  - justinsb 15y ago
    A healthy skepticism, then: nothing wrong with that. It's a speculative project with a big payoff if it succeeds, and I wouldn't ask you to believe until we've shown a working product. Your good wishes are appreciated though!

justinsb 15y ago

Certainly it is possible to engineer a hot standby solution for MySQL databases using DRBD, or synchronous replication etc. There's a choice between engineering an endless series of fixes like that, or re-examining the problem space and building a new database. After years of doing the former, we chose to examine the latter, and we're seeing good indications from that approach.

jacques_chester 15y ago
I have misgivings because you are not the first to try and re-examine the problem space. A lot of the endless series of fixes have arisen from just such attempts. I want you to succeed, but you're dealing with seriously hairy deep magic issues that the best minds in the industry and academia have been chipping away at for decades.
- justinsb 15y ago
  A healthy skepticism, then: nothing wrong with that. It's a speculative project with a big payoff if it succeeds, and I wouldn't ask you to believe until we've shown a working product. Your good wishes are appreciated though!