Amazon Relational Database Service

http://aws.amazon.com/rds/

by timf • 17 years ago

181 66 17 years ago

aws.amazon.com

sanswork• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

I wonder how:

http://fathomdb.com/about/home

will respond.

jpcx012• 17 years ago

Benchmarks. Show themselves significantly faster and more configurable (finely tuned via software) and people will pay.

staunch• 17 years 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.

fookyong2• 17 years ago

this is kind of a big deal.

cperciva3• 17 years 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.

fookyong2• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

You are paying extra for having them handle backups for you.

timf3• 17 years 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)

seldo2• 17 years ago

Agreed. When I read the headline I nearly creamed my jeans: finally! A scalable database in the cloud! Bring it!

But no, it's just MySQL in the cloud. That's great and all, but it's not going to solve the scalability problems of MySQL.

Does anybody do memcache-in-the-cloud yet?

jbyers3• 17 years 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.

clemesha2• 17 years 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• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

What does that mean?

In particular, what does that mean for everyone's favorite baby Dropbox?

hendler• 17 years ago

Dropbox makes desktop software and a web interface to cloud storage and shouldn't be affected negatively by new cloud services.

ssharp• 17 years ago

It means that companies offering services for AWS users need to be aware that AWS is growing vertically and could easily knock them out.

AWS is something I've been meaning to look at for a while now but from what I've seen, the value add services provide a easier experience. I'm not sure how else services are going to be able to differentiate. And at that, you're only going to attract small customers as larger customers are more likely to deal with any technical issues to the lower cost. Although, at that point, they may be willing to ditch AWS altogether. How AWS continues to evolve will be really interesting.

JoeAltmaier4• 17 years ago

Client services should be safe for a while - that's the place to add value.

jbyers3• 17 years ago

It means Amazon AWS is going to keep moving from bare VMs and storage all the way up through every component required to build on the web. And I should have been more clear. When I said relentless, I mean one should consider the possibility that they will move way beyond traditional definitions of hosting.

Is it hard to imagine Amazon providing utility-priced anycast DNS?

How about high volume email delivery?

Why not a Ruby, PHP, or python hosting stack?

Whole platforms, similar to Google Wave?

Where's this leave startups? Mostly unchanged if they're looking at their markets with a very critical, paranoid eye.

clemesha2• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

seldo2• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

How would Postgresql fare?

catch233• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

kapitalx• 17 years ago

I think it has more to do with user demand, familiarity, and also the ability to migrate over, as many users already use MySQL.

JoeAltmaier4• 17 years ago

They can give MySQL away for free

jonknee• 17 years ago

The price is right and their customers use it frequently. They were probably asked about MySQL a ton of times.

c00p3r4• 17 years ago

That's why - http://www.google.com/trends?q=MySQL,+PostgreSQL

ecq• 17 years ago

Actually they do offer Oracle in the cloud. All the features of Oracle full with Grid Control access, etc.

Amazon did a demo at the Oracle Open World a few weeks ago and it looked promising.

http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/global-solution-providers/or...

jbellis2• 17 years ago

It's already $27k/yr for their largest mysql instance. I'd hate to see what they'd charge for an even larger machine, with oracle license fees on top. :)

jpcx012• 17 years ago

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

JoeAltmaier4• 17 years ago

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

rantfoil• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

jbellis2• 17 years 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).

tibbon3• 17 years 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.

jbyers3• 17 years ago

Run the numbers when you consider bandwidth, spare parts, cost of employees who run out to colos in the middle of the night, flexibility. Compared to our current hosting (SoftLayer) for a site that does several million pageviews a day, the spreadsheet doesn't flip until you have hundreds of servers. One big difference though is that bandwidth at SoftLayer is rolled in, this would make Amazon hosting quite a bit more expensive.

mark_l_watson2• 17 years ago

I don't really agree with you unless you work for a very large company that has an economy of scale.

Think you can compete with AppEngine for cost per computation/bandwidth/storage? Developing for AppEngine is a bit restrictive, and Amazon provides much more flexibility for not too much more money for computation/bandwidth/storage.

Also, Amazon associated services like S3 and SimpleDB really are inexpensive for what you get.

I used to base my consulting business on deploying customer aps to VPSs or cheap servers. I think that Amazon and Google AppEngine are the future.

mattjung• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

Too expensive for me.

JoeAltmaier4• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

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

timf3• 17 years ago

http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/

gfodor• 17 years ago

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

c00p3r4• 17 years ago

MySQL had more hype.

izak30• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

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

mark_l_watson2• 17 years 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.

Amazon Relational Database Service

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