12 ms·

Amazon Relational Database Service

181 points by timf 17y ago

sanswork 17y ago
Amazon constantly impresses me with their AWS offerings and improvements. It's really refreshing to see them continue to build and improve their services so rapidly. Sometimes it seems there is a new feature or announcement every week. Now they just need to open that west coast datacenter. :)
snewe 17y ago
I wonder how: http://fathomdb.com/about/home http://fathomdb.com/about/home will respond.
- jpcx01 17y ago
  Benchmarks. Show themselves significantly faster and more configurable (finely tuned via software) and people will pay.
  - staunch 17y ago
    I suspect most people would rather use an official thing directly from Amazon, rather than a marginally (or even significantly) better thing from someone they've never heard of.
fookyong 17y ago
this is kind of a big deal.
- cperciva 17y ago
  It's not as big as it sounds -- this isn't a scalable relational database service. As far as I can see, this is just EC2 instances with mysql preinstalled.
  - fookyong 17y ago
    ah right. that said, it does remove one layer of complexity for the people who just want cloud-based DBs. before now we would have to either sign up with a 3rd party who would pipe data to Amazon, or manually configure EC2 instances - neither of which I particularly wanted to mess with. I definitely want to give this a whirl.
  - bobbyi 17y ago
    You are paying extra for having them handle backups for you.
    - cperciva 17y ago
      Looks to me like the backups are just Elastic Block Store snapshots -- which are available to normal EC2 users just like they are to Amazon RDS users.
  - timf 17y ago
    While it does run as an instance (looks like you don't get shell access), they provide new native API calls for adding and removing nodes on demand, and they will maintain the stack and backups for you. And in the future, API calls for automatically putting replicated DBs across availability zones. I would be less interested in it if it was not as a standalone instance per customer. Can you imagine having someone with a valid account into a shared MySQL server (and a stolen credit card) poking around all day? (especially on MySQL vulnerability announcement days)
    - cperciva 17y ago
      I would be less interested in it if it was not as a standalone instance per customer. I absolutely agree. My point was just that this seems to be Amazon wrapping up their existing service in a way which is easier to use and more marketable, rather than actually releasing something new. (Not that there is anything wrong with this, of course -- I'm sure there are many people who don't want to be bothered with figuring out how to get MySQL configured on EC2.)
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
jbyers 17y ago
It's been said here many times before: if you are an AWS value-add startup, watch out. Their march up the value chain is relentless.
- clemesha 17y ago
  AWS brings so much value to their target space that I'm willing to accept a certain amount of inherent lock-in. I've honestly never thought this about any other service, and it's a bit disturbing, but in my opinion this reflects their successful march up that value chain.
  - tow21 17y ago
    The "march up the value chain" isn't about lock-in. It's about the fact there are a lot of business providing services between AWS and other services running on AWS (eg, by providing pre-packaged AMIs containing ready-to-run MySQL databases, and automatic management thereof) This is because in the early days of AWS, it offered you lots of moving parts to tweak, but you had to learn a lot to make best use of it. There was quite a lot of room in the market for paying people to take away some of the headaches in managing AWS yourself. This is becoming less & less true as Amazon provide more services - if you're still in that space, then you ought to be looking worried.
- hyperbovine 17y ago
  What does that mean? In particular, what does that mean for everyone's favorite baby Dropbox?
  - hendler 17y ago
    Dropbox makes desktop software and a web interface to cloud storage and shouldn't be affected negatively by new cloud services.
    - kungfooey 17y ago
      I think the kind of company he's referring to would be something like RightScale.
clemesha 17y ago
What an awesome step forward. Just the thought of less and less System/Database Admin stuff, and more time to create apps is very exciting.
- tom_b 17y ago
  How much less db admin stuff, other than backup and patching, are you actually getting out of here? I tend to spend most of my time as an application dba (doing schema design and SQL programming using lots of analytical functions for data warehouse apps). So I spend more time doing dba type work analyzing access plans and examining physical storage than mucking around with backups - of course, data warehouses are somewhat forgiving in the backup space since you can usually (if somewhat painfully) reload staged source data if things go completely south. Looks like a cool service (although maybe postgres would have made me happier than MySQL here) other than that. Besides, I like all that DBA stuff - it is part of creating apps.
seldo 17y ago
I can see why they chose MySQL, but I would gladly pay for Oracle in the cloud as well. Plus, Oracle can scale up to a much bigger machine before you have to start scaling horizontally.
- zepolen 17y ago
  How would Postgresql fare?
- catch23 17y ago
  I'm not sure why they chose MySQL. Does mysql still scale linearly up to 8 cores? I figured most people who need 8 cores for mysql would have already gone to sharding or partitioning.
  - WALoeIII 17y ago
    5.1 scales better, and I would bet they're looking into XtraDB (if not already using it) which will go even further on multi-core machines. edit - 5.1 (recent releases) scales better mostly due to InnoDB 1.0.4 which incorporates a number of patches from Google (Mark Callagan), Percona and more.
    - catch23 17y ago
      but still, it doesn't scale as linearly as other databases like Oracle or PostgreSQL. Even compared against MySQL 5.1, PostgreSQL scales linearly all the way up to 128 cores -- so it seems like for big databases, you'd want to use something that can actually utilize all 128 cores. I'm pretty sure they're using MySQL because it's popular, not because it scales. I figure when people hit 10 million rows in a MySQL table, they start looking at sharding/partitioning instead of buying a bigger machine.
      - spudlyo 17y ago
        MySQL scales for reads pretty well since it has a well understood and mature replication system. In contrast, the PostgreSQL replication landscape is somewhat muddy. Scaling writes is a challenge of course, and PostgreSQL might be the better choice there for getting the most out of big hardware. Scaling up can really cost though, as the price-to-performance ratio gets outside of the sweet spot when the hardware you're buying gets more exotic.
jpcx01 17y ago
Looking forward to some benchmarks. If its fast enough, this'll make me switch over to EC2.
- JoeAltmaier 17y ago
  Particularly latency benchmarks. Quick enough for web-commerce isn't the same as quick enough for collaboration for instance.
rantfoil 17y ago
This is pretty cool, but for a startup at scale it still makes way more sense to own / operate on your own. For instance for a quadruple extra large instance (68GB) it would cost about $27k a year. Considering you'll want to do master-master for uptime, that's $60k out the door every year for two of these bad boys. Vs owning it... can get a decent dual master setup for a fraction of that.
- StarLite 17y ago
  Owning it is only part of the equation, think about hosting (you dont want to host your servers in your house on a DSL line), power usage (those bad boys will use a lot more then your desktop PC), cooling (they tend to get warm), backup solutions (an extra server, tape-libraries etc), maintenance (your super servers will break down at times) etc. $60K a year is peanuts for most companies.
  - jbellis 17y ago
    > hosting, power usage, cooling These are all the same thing, in the sense that they're all included by a colo provider, and even high-end colocation space will save you a ton over AWS. > backup solutions (an extra server, tape-libraries etc) Grandparent talked about server-level redundancy. > maintenance (your super servers will break down at times) 24h on-site service is a standard option on server-class hardware, and not all that expensive. > $60K a year is peanuts for most companies. It's peanuts for large companies, but they already have their own ops departments and won't shy away from the details of handling a little hardware. Smaller companies will be acutely aware that $60k/yr is a good fraction of the cost of hiring another developer (or marketer).
    - tibbon 17y ago
      Server level redundancy isn't backup, just as RAID isn't backup. If there's a mistake, or software-caused data corruption then you still lose.
  - tibbon 17y ago
    I'm facing this right now. I just bought 6 1U servers for almost nothing for one of the companies I work with, and now we have to figure out where to put them. We had a free 1U rack space before, but we're unsure if we'll be able to get 6U of space for free. If not, CoLo spots aren't all that cheap. Putting them in someone's house isn't an option and we don't have much money. Sure we had the money to buy the servers (some were $100/each used from another company that was switching to EC2)- but I don't have 100's/month for racking each of them nearby. We're a super-small company without much capital and zero investment right now. Totally bootstrapped and paying for stuff via consulting. There's no way in hell we have a 60K budget and if we bring in that much total in the next 9 months I'd be happy.
mattjung 17y ago
I am really impressed by all those nifty moves Amazon has made in the last three years to become the major cloud infrastructure provider (I would have expected it from Google). Every step makes completely sense. They were able to reinvent themselves, something very rare for economic giants...
tybris 17y ago
Too expensive for me.
- JoeAltmaier 17y ago
  If you don't value your time, it is expensive. If you already have some bricks-and-mortar, it is certainly expensive as an increment to what you have. But to me and my startup, its heaven-sent, because it saves two of my commodities that I have to strictly ration: my effort, and calendar time.
sant0sk1 17y ago
Doesn't Amazon realize we don't need no SQL? Spluh! (sarcasm - this is cool)
- timf 17y ago
  http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/
gfodor 17y ago
Cool, but sad they went with MySQL instead of PostgreSQL. Can't blame them though.
- c00p3r 17y ago
  MySQL had more hype.
- taw 17y ago
  It's not like you cannot run PostgreSQL on EC2 if you want.
izak30 17y ago
I've been playing with this while it's been in private beta. It's good, and works just like EC2, but for DB
waldrews 17y ago
Does anyone have a sense of what the ACID properties of this setup are, especially under replication?
mark_l_watson 17y ago
I spent 2 ours this morning playing with RDS - not really a waste of time since I deploy most of my customer's projects to EC2, etc. Sort-of kicking the tires. Anyway, it is easy to use, and not having to deal yourself with failure recover, managing a EBS volume if you run MySQL yourself, etc. makes it look like a good service once it comes out of beta. A few things: right now, you can't pay a reservation fee to get the really cheap EC2 rates. (Basically RDS is a managed-for-your EC2+EBS.) Also, it would be great if they also support PostgreSQL.

181 points by timf 17y ago

Amazon constantly impresses me with their AWS offerings and improvements. It's really refreshing to see them continue to build and improve their services so rapidly. Sometimes it seems there is a new feature or announcement every week. Now they just need to open that west coast datacenter. :)

snewe 17y ago

I wonder how: http://fathomdb.com/about/home http://fathomdb.com/about/home will respond.

jpcx01 17y ago
Benchmarks. Show themselves significantly faster and more configurable (finely tuned via software) and people will pay.
- staunch 17y ago
  I suspect most people would rather use an official thing directly from Amazon, rather than a marginally (or even significantly) better thing from someone they've never heard of.

fookyong 17y ago

this is kind of a big deal.

cperciva 17y ago
It's not as big as it sounds -- this isn't a scalable relational database service. As far as I can see, this is just EC2 instances with mysql preinstalled.
- fookyong 17y ago
  ah right. that said, it does remove one layer of complexity for the people who just want cloud-based DBs. before now we would have to either sign up with a 3rd party who would pipe data to Amazon, or manually configure EC2 instances - neither of which I particularly wanted to mess with. I definitely want to give this a whirl.
- bobbyi 17y ago
  You are paying extra for having them handle backups for you.
  - cperciva 17y ago
    Looks to me like the backups are just Elastic Block Store snapshots -- which are available to normal EC2 users just like they are to Amazon RDS users.
- timf 17y ago
  While it does run as an instance (looks like you don't get shell access), they provide new native API calls for adding and removing nodes on demand, and they will maintain the stack and backups for you. And in the future, API calls for automatically putting replicated DBs across availability zones. I would be less interested in it if it was not as a standalone instance per customer. Can you imagine having someone with a valid account into a shared MySQL server (and a stolen credit card) poking around all day? (especially on MySQL vulnerability announcement days)
  - cperciva 17y ago
    I would be less interested in it if it was not as a standalone instance per customer. I absolutely agree. My point was just that this seems to be Amazon wrapping up their existing service in a way which is easier to use and more marketable, rather than actually releasing something new. (Not that there is anything wrong with this, of course -- I'm sure there are many people who don't want to be bothered with figuring out how to get MySQL configured on EC2.)

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

jbyers 17y ago

It's been said here many times before: if you are an AWS value-add startup, watch out. Their march up the value chain is relentless.

clemesha 17y ago
AWS brings so much value to their target space that I'm willing to accept a certain amount of inherent lock-in. I've honestly never thought this about any other service, and it's a bit disturbing, but in my opinion this reflects their successful march up that value chain.
- tow21 17y ago
  The "march up the value chain" isn't about lock-in. It's about the fact there are a lot of business providing services between AWS and other services running on AWS (eg, by providing pre-packaged AMIs containing ready-to-run MySQL databases, and automatic management thereof) This is because in the early days of AWS, it offered you lots of moving parts to tweak, but you had to learn a lot to make best use of it. There was quite a lot of room in the market for paying people to take away some of the headaches in managing AWS yourself. This is becoming less & less true as Amazon provide more services - if you're still in that space, then you ought to be looking worried.
hyperbovine 17y ago
What does that mean? In particular, what does that mean for everyone's favorite baby Dropbox?
- hendler 17y ago
  Dropbox makes desktop software and a web interface to cloud storage and shouldn't be affected negatively by new cloud services.
  - kungfooey 17y ago
    I think the kind of company he's referring to would be something like RightScale.

clemesha 17y ago

What an awesome step forward. Just the thought of less and less System/Database Admin stuff, and more time to create apps is very exciting.

tom_b 17y ago
How much less db admin stuff, other than backup and patching, are you actually getting out of here? I tend to spend most of my time as an application dba (doing schema design and SQL programming using lots of analytical functions for data warehouse apps). So I spend more time doing dba type work analyzing access plans and examining physical storage than mucking around with backups - of course, data warehouses are somewhat forgiving in the backup space since you can usually (if somewhat painfully) reload staged source data if things go completely south. Looks like a cool service (although maybe postgres would have made me happier than MySQL here) other than that. Besides, I like all that DBA stuff - it is part of creating apps.

seldo 17y ago

I can see why they chose MySQL, but I would gladly pay for Oracle in the cloud as well. Plus, Oracle can scale up to a much bigger machine before you have to start scaling horizontally.

zepolen 17y ago
How would Postgresql fare?
catch23 17y ago
I'm not sure why they chose MySQL. Does mysql still scale linearly up to 8 cores? I figured most people who need 8 cores for mysql would have already gone to sharding or partitioning.
- WALoeIII 17y ago
  5.1 scales better, and I would bet they're looking into XtraDB (if not already using it) which will go even further on multi-core machines. edit - 5.1 (recent releases) scales better mostly due to InnoDB 1.0.4 which incorporates a number of patches from Google (Mark Callagan), Percona and more.
  - catch23 17y ago
    but still, it doesn't scale as linearly as other databases like Oracle or PostgreSQL. Even compared against MySQL 5.1, PostgreSQL scales linearly all the way up to 128 cores -- so it seems like for big databases, you'd want to use something that can actually utilize all 128 cores. I'm pretty sure they're using MySQL because it's popular, not because it scales. I figure when people hit 10 million rows in a MySQL table, they start looking at sharding/partitioning instead of buying a bigger machine.
    - spudlyo 17y ago
      MySQL scales for reads pretty well since it has a well understood and mature replication system. In contrast, the PostgreSQL replication landscape is somewhat muddy. Scaling writes is a challenge of course, and PostgreSQL might be the better choice there for getting the most out of big hardware. Scaling up can really cost though, as the price-to-performance ratio gets outside of the sweet spot when the hardware you're buying gets more exotic.

jpcx01 17y ago

Looking forward to some benchmarks. If its fast enough, this'll make me switch over to EC2.

JoeAltmaier 17y ago
Particularly latency benchmarks. Quick enough for web-commerce isn't the same as quick enough for collaboration for instance.

rantfoil 17y ago

This is pretty cool, but for a startup at scale it still makes way more sense to own / operate on your own. For instance for a quadruple extra large instance (68GB) it would cost about $27k a year. Considering you'll want to do master-master for uptime, that's $60k out the door every year for two of these bad boys. Vs owning it... can get a decent dual master setup for a fraction of that.

StarLite 17y ago
Owning it is only part of the equation, think about hosting (you dont want to host your servers in your house on a DSL line), power usage (those bad boys will use a lot more then your desktop PC), cooling (they tend to get warm), backup solutions (an extra server, tape-libraries etc), maintenance (your super servers will break down at times) etc. $60K a year is peanuts for most companies.
- jbellis 17y ago
  > hosting, power usage, cooling These are all the same thing, in the sense that they're all included by a colo provider, and even high-end colocation space will save you a ton over AWS. > backup solutions (an extra server, tape-libraries etc) Grandparent talked about server-level redundancy. > maintenance (your super servers will break down at times) 24h on-site service is a standard option on server-class hardware, and not all that expensive. > $60K a year is peanuts for most companies. It's peanuts for large companies, but they already have their own ops departments and won't shy away from the details of handling a little hardware. Smaller companies will be acutely aware that $60k/yr is a good fraction of the cost of hiring another developer (or marketer).
  - tibbon 17y ago
    Server level redundancy isn't backup, just as RAID isn't backup. If there's a mistake, or software-caused data corruption then you still lose.
- tibbon 17y ago
  I'm facing this right now. I just bought 6 1U servers for almost nothing for one of the companies I work with, and now we have to figure out where to put them. We had a free 1U rack space before, but we're unsure if we'll be able to get 6U of space for free. If not, CoLo spots aren't all that cheap. Putting them in someone's house isn't an option and we don't have much money. Sure we had the money to buy the servers (some were $100/each used from another company that was switching to EC2)- but I don't have 100's/month for racking each of them nearby. We're a super-small company without much capital and zero investment right now. Totally bootstrapped and paying for stuff via consulting. There's no way in hell we have a 60K budget and if we bring in that much total in the next 9 months I'd be happy.

mattjung 17y ago

I am really impressed by all those nifty moves Amazon has made in the last three years to become the major cloud infrastructure provider (I would have expected it from Google). Every step makes completely sense. They were able to reinvent themselves, something very rare for economic giants...

tybris 17y ago

Too expensive for me.

JoeAltmaier 17y ago
If you don't value your time, it is expensive. If you already have some bricks-and-mortar, it is certainly expensive as an increment to what you have. But to me and my startup, its heaven-sent, because it saves two of my commodities that I have to strictly ration: my effort, and calendar time.

sant0sk1 17y ago

Doesn't Amazon realize we don't need no SQL? Spluh! (sarcasm - this is cool)

timf 17y ago
http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/

gfodor 17y ago

Cool, but sad they went with MySQL instead of PostgreSQL. Can't blame them though.

c00p3r 17y ago
MySQL had more hype.
taw 17y ago
It's not like you cannot run PostgreSQL on EC2 if you want.

izak30 17y ago

I've been playing with this while it's been in private beta. It's good, and works just like EC2, but for DB

waldrews 17y ago

Does anyone have a sense of what the ACID properties of this setup are, especially under replication?

mark_l_watson 17y ago

I spent 2 ours this morning playing with RDS - not really a waste of time since I deploy most of my customer's projects to EC2, etc. Sort-of kicking the tires. Anyway, it is easy to use, and not having to deal yourself with failure recover, managing a EBS volume if you run MySQL yourself, etc. makes it look like a good service once it comes out of beta. A few things: right now, you can't pay a reservation fee to get the really cheap EC2 rates. (Basically RDS is a managed-for-your EC2+EBS.) Also, it would be great if they also support PostgreSQL.