Amazon Cloud Adds Hosted MySQL

1sockchuck writes "Amazon Web Services has added a relational database service to host MySQL databases in the cloud, and is also dropping prices on its Amazon EC2 compute service by as much as 15 percent. Amazon says the new service lets users focus on development rather than maintenance, but it will probably be bad news for startups offering database services built atop Amazon's cloud. Cloud Avenue warns that Amazon RDS should serve as 'a warning bell for the companies that build their entire business on Amazon ecosystem. ... They are just one announcement away from complete destruction.' Data Center Knowledge has a roundup of analysis and commentary on Amazon RDS and its impact on the cloud ecosystem."

Comments

Showing their cards at last

[Mateo_LeFou]

Turns out "the cloud" is just another name for "datacenter". Who knew?

Re:Showing their cards at last

[slim]

I'm getting increasingly fed up of every cloud story getting piles of comments deriding cloud as "just" something else.

- "The Cloud is just another name for datacenter"
- "The Cloud is just another name for distributed computing"
- "The Cloud is just another name for thin-client computing"
- etc.

In this particular case, yes, the backend of the Amazon cloud is a bunch of datacentres.
And you could build a virtual datacentre in the Amazon cloud.

But that doesn't mean that every datacentre is a cloud, because a cloud has properties that most datacentres do not.

Re:Showing their cards at last

[Anonymous Coward]

The Cloud is just a buzz word. It makes non-techies feel clued in without having to understand the differences among a handful of technologies and how they work together.

Re:Showing their cards at last

[base3]

And he forgot "The cloud is just another name for timesharing." The 1960s called; it wants it glass house computing model back.

Re:Showing their cards at last

[slim]

The Cloud is just a buzz word. It makes non-techies feel clued in without having to understand the differences among a handful of technologies and how they work together.

At first I thought you were contradicting me. But you're not, necessarily.

"Cake is just a buzz word. It makes non-bakers feel clued in without having to understand the differences among a handful of ingredients and how they work together."

Combine eggs, flour, baking powder, sugar, flavourings, in just the right recipe, you get a cake.
Combine datacenter technogolies, virtualisation, parallelisation, timesharing, web based management, in just the right recipe, and you get a cloud.

This doesn't mean that "cake" or "cloud" aren't useful shorthands.

Re:Showing their cards at last

[fucket]

So you're saying... the cake is a lie?

Re:Showing their cards at last

[dissy]

There is a pretty big difference however.

In your companies case, you are not paying for what you use, you are paying for everything, in a lot of cases up front instead of over time.

You need to buy servers, their resources (memory, storage, backup media, interconnect system, etc), as well as the datacenter itself (power, cooling, arrangement, management, staff maintenance, bandwidth, etc), and then once everything is up and running functionally, you still have paid for all of those things like servers storage bandwidth and power, no matter if you are using 100% or 1% of your system.

In amazons case, you don't. You pay for what you use, as you use it, no more no less.
You don't need to pay upfront costs for servers, the infrastructure to support them, and the people to run them. You DO pay for those things, but only a very tiny percentage of, which happens to be the percentage of their resources or skills you use.

At least for the moment, it is much cheaper to buy these resources from amazon, than to pay to build up a datacenter to start with 1 or 2 machines, but be able to scale up to millions. That would have such a huge up front cost that it is not even an option for most small businesses.

There will always be situations where the obvious answer is doing it yourself. This will never change.
That does not exclude the fact there are other situations where using cloud time sharing is the better answer.

Re:Showing their cards at last

[MaerD]

No, he's saying the cloud is a a pie.

Re:Showing their cards at last

[TooMuchToDo]

What you don't mention is that you pay a premium for using only what you need instead of building out your own infrastructure. In some cases, the premium is upwards of 100% (have had to run the numbers for several clients, for some it works out well, for some it's grossly more expensive).

Re:Showing their cards at last

[slim]

What you don't mention is that you pay a premium for using only what you need instead of building out your own infrastructure. In some cases, the premium is upwards of 100% (have had to run the numbers for several clients, for some it works out well, for some it's grossly more expensive).

I think that's fair. It would be pretty amazing if it worked out cheaper in all cases, and everyone should run the numbers and evaluate the benefits before going into it.

I know Smugmug.com believe they're $500K by using S3 instead of their own storage servers. http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/11/10/amazon-s3-show-me-the-money/

But, there are plenty of scenarios where due to predictable loads (or simply low loads), or simple requirements Amazon's pricing model is a bad fit.

I would be most tempted by Amazon's model if I was starting up a service, was hoping for huge sudden growth, but didn't have the confidence to invest upfront in my own hardware for that capacity.

Re:Showing their cards at last

[slim]

a cloud has properties that most datacentres do not.

Like what?

Like, a single node failing is routine, routed around in software, and not considered a problem. Yes, in a traditional datacentre you'd have dual or treble redundant servers, but if one goes down in the middle of the night it's a crisis and an operator's pager goes off. Not in a cloud.

Like: Bringing up a new VM, or hundreds of new VMs, is something you can do on a whim. Yes, newer VM-oriented datacentres have the technology to do this, but because of the way they're managed and financed, usually you have to go through a time consuming approval/requisitioning process to even add one VM.

Like: Dynamic scaling and location. For example, with S3, if your store is getting a lot of hits, you'll benefit from Akamai-like caching wherever in the world Amazon has a presence.

And more. Anything you can imagine that comes from using a small fraction of a really huge pool of computing resources, spread across the planet.

A Little Disappointed

[Comatose51]

I was a little disappointed that MySQL was the only choice offered. I was hoping for Postgres to be offered along side. It's strange to me that most ISPs/hosting companies still don't offer Postgres. MySQL is prevalent but its future is a bit shaky at the moment. Postgres is open source and offers some great features.

Re:A Little Disappointed

[skgrey]

For a first step, MySQL was the obvious choice and it shows a move in the right direction.

I do enjoy how everyone is trying to beat down Cloud Computing. It's basically a new technology, and just like every other new technology there are going to be bugs and issues that affect SLA right away. If you are putting all your eggs in the Cloud basket, it's the same as using that brand new bleeding-edge Cisco product or virtualization platform. You have to expect some pain until they hone the "technology".

Sure there's no good overall definition, and it's become kind of a joke in certain circles, but there are some solid ideas behind clouds. Sometimes I think it's because engineers are more worried about their jobs five years from now, because if clouds do catch on their jobs will be in jeopardy.

Re:A Little Disappointed

[Fotograf]

well i am not IT pro or something, but what exactly is "new" on this cloud? I mean i have been clouding my websites, databases and file storage for years, they are called ISP. My provides, virtual or physical PC, SMB host, or full windows host, managed. Storage as much as one can pay for business and home users...?

Re:A Little Disappointed

[maxume]

In the context you speak of, the new thing is the billing.

(The ability to use automated systems to quickly add and remove virtual machines is also an advancement from traditional virtual hosting)

Re:A Little Disappointed

[dingen]

well i am not IT pro or something, but what exactly is "new" on this cloud?

The fact that you pay only for what you actually use and the services scales automatically to fit your needs.

Re:A Little Disappointed

[slim]

If you're buying a physical server from your ISP, that's not a cloud. If you're buying a virtual server, is it hosted dynamically across hundreds or thousands of physical machines? If not, that's not a cloud.

Now, this probably doesn't matter to you. What you actually care about is price, performance, capacity, availability, resilience, flexibility etc.

Many believe that running a cloud is the easiest, cheapest way to sell fast, reliable hosting services, which can be commissioned and decommissioned in a very flexible manner. You can buy a VM from Amazon in seconds, and have it running instantly. You can close it down and stop paying just as fast.

One open question is, should the marketing use the buzzword? You don't actually care that it's in a cloud. You just care about its cost and features. But then again, being told it's in a cloud gives you clues about its features.

Re:A Little Disappointed

[Rogerborg]

Pretend that I don't work in marketing, and thus don't enjoy the frisson of hearing new terms for old rope. If one provider offers me "cloud computing" and the other offers "software as a service", what does that tell me about the likely functional differences in their offerings?

Re:A Little Disappointed

[jcnnghm]

Very true. Hourly billing and the ability to quickly provision systems is what makes these services. For our newest application, we only purchased enough equipment to handle the application base load. Our application then monitors the acceleration of system response times, load, and requests to automatically provision cloud servers. Essentially, we'll transfer messaging servers to the cloud, then internally re-provision to handle the new application loads, depending on what the actual load looks like. When the load falls, we'll transition back.

The benefit of cloud computing is that for a few dollars a month, we can provision a few extra servers for the relatively few hours of peak load. This allows us to reduce our upfront cash outlay, while also allowing us to maximize our server usage.

Warning Bell

[slim]

I guess the warning bell is, if your business model is to host something simple and obvious on EC2, then resell it, you can expect direct competition - in this case from Amazon themselves.

To be sustainable, you need to add something difficult, or non-obvious, or that fills a niche, or stands out in some other way.

Cloud Avenue could still do OK, if they can make their offering better than Amazon's, by whatever means - a nicer UI, better management tools, better customer support, etc.

Re:Warning Bell

[Attila Dimedici]

I guess the warning bell is, if your business model is to host something simple and obvious on EC2, then resell it, you can expect direct competition - in this case from Amazon themselves.

To be sustainable, you need to add something difficult, or non-obvious, or that fills a niche, or stands out in some other way.

Cloud Avenue could still do OK, if they can make their offering better than Amazon's, by whatever means - a nicer UI, better management tools, better customer support, etc.

If you base your business model on using the services of a bigger company to offer services to your customers, it is just a matter of time until that bigger company decides that they would rather get the money you are making than the money you are paying them. The only exception to that is if the service you are providing is a lot of work on a day to day basis (as opposed to being very difficult to develop, but then it basically runs itself), and is only of interest to a small niche market.

Re:Warning Bell

[slim]

If you base your business model on using the services of a bigger company to offer services to your customers, it is just a matter of time until that bigger company decides that they would rather get the money you are making than the money you are paying them.

There's quite a lot of precedent for smaller companies reselling services from larger companies.

IBM used to offer EDI interchange services. A lot of the sales were through industry specific resellers. So company X knows about, say, the insurance industry, and sells EDI services to insurers. Company X has its own helpdesk, and only refers the harder questions to IBM. IBM is very happy with this arrangement. The subs roll in month after month. IBM doesn't need to train anyone in the foibles of the insurance industry. Company Y, meanwhile, is reselling the same service to the automotive industry.

Then there's the thousands of gambling websites that are merely thin rebrandings of the same few underlying sites, which get referral fees. The larger company that writes the software and runs the service is effectively outsourcing consumer marketing, while also protecting themselves from risk.

Re:Warning Bell

[Full Metal Jackass]

So, would Cloud Avenue's business model not be threatened if they hosted the databases on their own physical servers?

Quadruple Extra Large

[vagabond_gr]

With the two new types, their instance list looks like the McDonalds menu.

I'd like a Quadruple Extra Large with cheese please.

Not competitive enough

[Richard_at_work]

While not directly comparable, the Azure platform being launched next month by Microsoft includes two relational database options:

1. Small database (1GB)- $9.99/month
2. Large database (10GB) - $99.99/month

Each SQL Azure database is triple redundant automatically, and you do not pay for storage or load balancing. The Amazon model has you paying for the instance ($81 per 31 days for the small instance) plus storage charges and other costs.

Not too impressed at the moment.

Re:Not competitive enough

[raylu]

What?

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/

# Web Edition: Up to 1 GB relational database = $9.99 / month
# Business Edition: Up to 10 GB relational database = $99.99 / month
# Bandwidth = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB

Web Edition Relational Database includes:

* Up to 1 GB of T-SQL based relational database
* Self-managed DB, auto high availability
* Best suited for Web application, Departmental custom apps.

Business Edition DB includes:

* Up to 10 GB of T-SQL based relational database
* Self-managed DB, auto high availability
* Additional features in the future like auto-partition, CLR, fanouts etc.
* Best suited for ISVs packaged LOB apps, Department custom apps

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

# Small DB Instance: 1.7 GB memory, 1 ECU (1 virtual core with 1 ECU), 64-bit platform.
# Large DB Instance: 7.5 GB memory, 4 ECUs (2 virtual cores with 2 ECUs each), 64-bit platform
# Extra Large DB Instance: 15 GB of memory, 8 ECUs (4 virtual cores with 2 ECUs each), 64-bit platform
# Double Extra Large DB Instance: 34 GB of memory, 13 ECUs (4 virtual cores with 3,25 ECUs each), 64-bit platform
# Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance: 68 GB of memory, 26 ECUs (8 virtual cores with 3.25 ECUs each), 64-bit platform

(Price per hour)
Small DB Instance $0.11
Large DB Instance $0.44
Extra Large DB Instance $0.88
Double Extra Large DB Instance $1.55
Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance $3.10

Provisioned Database Storage

For each DB Instance class, Amazon RDS provides you the ability to select from 5 GB to 1 TB of associated storage capacity for your primary data set.

* $0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage
* $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests

Data Transfer In

* All Data Transfer $0.10 per GB

Data Transfer Out

* First 10 TB per Month $0.17 per GB
* Next 40 TB per Month $0.13 per GB
* Next 100TB per Month $0.11 per GB
* Over 150 TB per Month $0.10 per GB

Data transferred between two Amazon Web Services within the same region (e.g. between Amazon RDS US and Amazon EC2 US) is free of charge.

The minimum on Amazon is 5GB, so let's compare 10GB. For Amazon at 1 month, you're paying $0.10 * 10 = $1 for storage and your $81.84 is about right. Note that this $82.84 is not comparable to the "Web Edition" offering from Microsoft, as that's for 1GB of storage. The "Small DB Instance" offering from Amazon is for an instance, not for storage, which you pay for completely separately.

So this $82.84 figure is really only comparable to Microsoft's "Business Edition" offering at $99.99, both before bandwidth costs. Bandwidth costs apply to Azure too under a different pricing model. The data in cost is exactly the same and the data out cost is $0.02/GB more expensive for Amazon for the first 10 TB and cheaper after that. You do have to pay Amazon an additional $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests, though.

On the other hand, Amazon allows you to buy way more than 10GB of storage, different instances, and

Cost

[tibman]

The smallest instance is 11 cents an hour or ~$80 a month. That just seems like a lot to me, atleast for a personal DB. That $80 only gets you a virtual box with "1.7 GB memory, 1 ECU (1 virtual core with 1 ECU), 64-bit platform." with a max of 1 TB storage (also an additional cost). It just doesn't seem worth it, tbh.

I guess if a company is counting hardware costs, payroll, electricity, and stuff like that.. $80 might be a good deal. But i think most people would rather have a normal server hosted for $10-20 a month.

Re:Cost

[JPDeckers]

No, you don't.

You pay on run-time, not CPU time consumed, so pay 0.11*24*31 for a month, regardless of usage.

Unless ofcourse you have a script that fires up an instance on the moment your website is accessed, and shuts it down afterward, but that might be sub-optimal in responsetime :)

Optimization

[dingen]

I wonder if programming for cloud services will bring back the need for code that is optimized for speed (or using as little resources as possible), since you pay for the actual usage of these resources.

Re:Optimization

[slim]

For non-cloud computing, you pay too much every single day, until you reach optimum usage level. Then you exceed the optimum usage level, and have to buy another server, and pay too much again. So it's a series of server-sized steps, approximating a curve.

If you were paying by the timeslice, the cloud equivalent would show a smooth curve, matching the growth in usage.

OTOH with EC2 you pay by the hour of uptime, rather than by processor usage, so CPU usage isn't of the essence for many applications.

You might well optimise to minimise the stuff you really are paying for. Web designers already try to minimise download bandwidth. You might also strive to compress data before storing it -- but as always, it's a tradeoff between how much it saves, and how much it costs to do.

Re:I did some maths

[vagabond_gr]

If you run your site on a single server then it's much smaller than slashdot, no matter how many cores or ram you have. Also, it means that your site is down much more often than it should. If you want a serious infrastructure with redundancy, EC2 is a quite cheap solution, with many advantages in terms of maintenance and scaling.

I'm not sure what's so compelling

[HangingChad]

It rids the customers of any need for time consuming database administration tasks.

I'm sorry but administering a db just isn't that difficult or time-consuming. It takes a certain level of technical knowledge to write good SQL. If you can do that, usually you have enough skill to handle the little bit of maintenance MySQL requires. This isn't like running an Exchange or SQL Server with a ton of overhead, licensing fees, and required add-ons. You can scale MySQL for the cost of hardware. I'm not seeing a compelling reason to let Amazon run my databases.

And then there's no question of who owns the data, who has access to it, and what happens to your data if you can't pay the hosting bill? If your application or web site is so wildly successful that you have to manage failover and load balancing, then you can afford to hire people to solve those happy problems.

Why the confusion?

[Maudib]

I am not sure why people are so confused about what cloud computing means in this context. It is pretty straightforward-

(1) Yes, the underlying technology is "just" a data-center that you could provision through standard channels.
(2) Yes, it is "just" a normal MySQL server that you could manage and scale through normal means.

Now take those above functions, and put them behind an API that we can call into from our software. Could you manage the same things directly? Of course! However there are use cases where being able to control these functions through is very desirable.

Now take a bunch of other infrastructure resources and put control of them all behind APIs too. One ends up with a very different thing then traditional hosting. You can't provision 100x servers/databases/hadoop nodes for a single hour or night at a traditional host based on some event your software manages, and then pay less then $100. Sure the underlying tools are the same, and there are many traditional use cases where AWS is actually more expensive. However there are an equal number of situations where the reverse is also true.

As for who owns the data, thats just FUD resulting from an unfortunate overlap in terms with things like Facebook. The AWS TOS and contract is quite clear on who owns the data. Just like any other data center, if you don't secure/encrypt your stuff it is possible for the host to look into it, but this is no more likely in AWS then at Rack Space or Data Pipe.

It's a screaming deal

[Wee]

I guess if a company is counting hardware costs, payroll, electricity, and stuff like that.. $80 might be a good deal. But i think most people would rather have a normal server hosted for $10-20 a month.

"Might be a good deal"? Are you kidding? It's a raging deal! You get patching, sysadmin, hosting, etc for that $80. You likely even get more in terms of resources than you would on your "normal" $20/month hosted server (which is probably going to be some pokey virtualized instance on a grossly overloaded server some place).

You also get backups and redundancy for that eighty bucks. The PSU blows in that hosted server and you're looking at downtime. You lose a disk and then you're looking at paying one of your employees to re-install everything, reload the DB, test it, etc.

You can do a hell of a lot with what they're giving you. I wouldn't use it for a personal web site or anything, but for a small business who needs a basic DB-backed web site/service, it's quite a deal (especially if they are short on internal IT resources). Given MySQL's popularity in its nice, I'd say the DB choice was appropriate as well.

-B