Re:Amazon Aurora Backtrack
by inyourtenement on Friday May 11, 2018 @07:03AM
(#17046291)
RDS already has PIT restore, and yes there is a UI for it. This is different. They would not be making an announcement for PIT restore.
A good question is, how is it different. With PIT restores, they create a new instance from snapshot and play back the logs up to the relevant point. With this Aurora-only feature, they take advantage of Aurora's storage capabilities, and rewind the same database to a previous point. No new instance, no cold recovery from snapshot, no long log replay.
Re:Amazon Aurora Backtrack
by cookiecaper on Friday May 11, 2018 @01:30PM
(#17049233)
Yeah, I know that Aurora already had point-in-time restore. It's disingenuous to pretend like this is something different. This is, at best, an upgrade to Amazon's processes to make the restore process smoother in the ways you've mentioned.
As the previous commentor said, this isn't point in time restore or a change in our processes. It is a change to our database and storage engine to mark regions of log-structured storage as if they did not occur. That's why we can complete a Backtrack in a few seconds - we're just moving some pointers around and restarting the database.
AWS may have contributed some new technologies, but for the most part, they've just wrapped things up in a GUI. I'm not denigrating that as a valid market niche to fill, but people should know that there are non-AWS solutions for virtually everything that AWS provides, and that your company's admins probably already employ a good portion of them.