Hosted MySQL: Amazon RDS (and backups)

Among all the different technologies in our stack, we also use MySQL. While we still run MySQL (or Percona-Server) ourselves, we selected a managed solution to power parts of our production infrastructure: a Multi-AZ setup with Amazon’s RDS. AZ is Amazon-speak for “availability zone”, essentially a datacenter. RDS stands for: Relational Database Service. Judging from my experience with our own setups where EBS is in the mix, I have to say that Amazon does an outstanding job hiding these potential issues with RDS from us....

March 17, 2012 · 8 min

Some thoughts on outtages

Cloud, everybody wants it, some actually use it. So what’s my take away from AWS’ recent outtage? Background So first off, we had two pieces of our infrastructure failing (three if we include our Multi-AV RDS) — both of which involve EBS. Numero uno One of those pieces in my immediate reach was a MySQL server, which we use to keep sessions. And to say the least about AWS and in their defense, the instance had run for almost 550 days and had never given us much or any reason to let us down....

April 23, 2011 · 8 min