How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to PostgreSQL with no downtime

Re:How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to Postg... by genwin on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @01:40PM (#4779712)

> There's nothing wrong with AWS - indeed, we still run a staging environment there - but our database benefits greatly from the low latencies of physical disks...

Doesn't AWS have physical disks for RDS? What am I missing?

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Re:How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to Postg... by friism on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @02:03PM (#4779887)

AWS RDS uses EBS for storage[1]. Depending on RDS instance type, I think they use multiple raid'ed EBS volumes. EBS relies on physical disks, of course, but they're accessed as SAN devices over the network and that means higher latency than accessing disks that are hardware-attached to the local instance.

EBS has historically also had somewhat variable performance (on top of the extra network latency), but the new provisioned IOPS feature should help with that[2].

[1]: http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/

[2]: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2012/07/31/announc...

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Re:How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to Postg... by dangrossman on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @02:03PM (#4779889)

No, RDS runs on a virtual RAID array of virtual disks over a network (EBS).

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