Robin Clarke – Life and Tech

A couple of days ago, Amazon released their RDS service.  Being a MySQL fan, I had to have a try!

The cool stuff:

• It is well documented, and pretty easy to set up an instance.
• You can dynamically change the class (CPU power and Memory) of a database instance – this means you can give it more power without shutting it down, and easily scale it without having to do complex MySQL proxy configuration and synchronisation.

What’s still missing:

• Not available in EU yet (it should be soon) – I set up a few instances in the US, but can’t really test what the performance is in the EU between EC2 instances and RDS instances, and that’s what I’m really interested in…
• I takes a long time for the instance to become available!  I was waiting between 5 and 30 minutes.  I guess that’s not such an issue if you are just creating it once and leaving it running as the data hub for an application, but it’s annoyingly slow for testing/playing.  At least they don’t seem to start billing for time until it is online.

Other interesting notes

• If you start the instance without any parameters, it will have a typical configuration for the machine used (memory allocation spread between InnoDB and MyISAM).  It is however possible to specify parameters when the instance is started, or even during run time – this gives a lot of room for optimisation: it’s not just a dumb service, you can tune it to your requirements.
• Just for kicks and giggles, I tried scaling a small instance to a large instance, without any custom parameters: the only change was allocating all the additional memory to innodb_buffer_pool_size.  I guess that’s what most people want…

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