Amazon RDS for MySQL - Is it any good?

We have been testiing the MySQL RDS Service from Amazon here at RF, and so far it looks good for what we use MySQL for. We don't have that much data left in MySQL though, but some of the services are still mission critical, and we have had a couple running on RDS for a week or so.

I have to say I am pretty happy so far, but there are a couple of things you should know before you get to use the services. To begin with, you don't get a proper MySQL root account, i.e. no SUPER privileges. No big deal I guess, but this means there are a few things you cannot do. I was planning to migrate off the EC2 based server to RDS by setting up the RDS service as a slave, and then switching to the RDS service, but as SUPER privilege is required for CHANGE MASTER TO, I could not do this. And before you ask: Amazon DOES support slaves among the RDS servers, but this is set up using their own methods. Easy to use, yes, but not as flexible as the real thing.

As for parameters, you can modify a bunch of them, but not all. I have to benchmark performance here eventually, but it has been sufficient for our modest MySQL needs so far, so I might not even do that. I also have to check what parameters I am allowed to modify and which I can't in some more detail also, to figure out if there is anything significant missing.

So far though, I think the conclusion is that this is a great service for people with low / medium requirements in terms of MySQL. Backup and snapshots are a breeze and are automated, cross availability zone use is also an option (not tested by me though). The server is accessed just like any other service, so you can set up Route 53 with a more reasonable name to point to it, if you wish. Which nodes can access the server is also controlled by you, both the service itself controlling what can access it, and by the usual MySQL GRANTs.

When we get more servers running on RDS, I'll let you know more.

Cheers
/Karlsson

Oh no, what have I done! Or: My cloud evangelism got cloudy. Or: The dog ate my network..

At the recent MySQL User Conference, I had a talk on how we at Recorded Future use Amazon EC2 to keep our servers humming (the slides for the talk are available here). And of cource, Amazon EC2 turned back on me (and us all at RF) about a week later. I will not go into details, but somehow, we still don't know exactly why ("The cleaning lady unplugged THE SERVER to plug in the vacuum-cleaner", "The dog ate my network"?).

The thing has been down for 24+ hours now, and there is no end in sight, as far as I can tell. As I said in my talk, we are considering a move to Amazon RDS instead of running our MySQL servers ourselves, and one of my first reactions to this trouble was that we really should have done that already. That was until I realized that the Amazon RDS service was affected as well. Which all goes to show: The more things you ut in one SPOF, then more things will fail when that SPOF fails. And we are not alone, Reddit, Quora and many more in the Amazon us-east1 Availability Zone are in a similar situation. I wonder how the other database HA Solutions for Amazon survived (xeround at all)? Did they do OK or not, if they did, then this would be a selling argument for them. And if I was Rackspace (which I am not), I would launch a compaign right now...

Today we have been trying to set up our services in another Availability Zone. Our EBS disks are no good, but the snapshots are, so we should have something up an running real soon.

Cheers
/Karlsson
Who will stay with EC2, but will look at managing more things myself and to prepare for a solid backup plan, without Amazon intervention (Amazons statement that the Availability Zones are isolated wasn't really true, it seems). And who will not translate HA into "I let Amazon handle that"...

Hey, it's time for the MySQL User Conference again! Come see me!

And I mean that, come see me, say hello, buy me a beer (extra points!). Or even more so, come see my session at 10:50 on tuesday morning April 12. I'll be speaking on how to manage large datasets in an Amazon EC2 environment, and this is largely based on my experiences at doing just that at my new job (or new, I've been doing it for more that 6 months now) as Database Architect at Recorded Future.

This will not be an incredibly technical presentation, in terms of showing actual code and things. Rather, I will look at some of the issues when running in an EC2 environment, and how we manage it here at Recorded Future. Also, I will present a bit of how our architecture works, which is more relevant that one may thinks, as we have Cloud based architectures on mind all the time, all our development, testing and productions servers run in the cloud.

Anyway, this is going to be a lot of fun, and if you have specific requests or questions before my talk, then drop me an email at anders@recordedfuture.com.

/Karlsson