News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Immutable Infrastructure: No SSH. Parent comment

Re:Immutable Infrastructure: No SSH by axelfontaine on Monday July 13, 2015 @06:44AM (#9877291)
This type of image is primarily designed for 12-factor apps where all persistent state is kept outside the instance in some geo-redundant highly available system like Amazon RDS or S3.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Immutable Infrastructure: No SSH by falcolas on Monday July 13, 2015 @08:54AM (#9877783)
The problem with Amazon RDS, and they freely admit it, is that it's not built for the scale at which some companies operate. If you need advanced features of your DB, or need to operate at large scales (the magnitude of scale differs by RDS engine), you'll end up wanting to run your own DB on an EC2 instance.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Immutable Infrastructure: No SSH by jacques_chester on Monday July 13, 2015 @09:04AM (#9877821)
When you have enough business that RDS is too small, you are not going to be heartbroken about paying for a bespoke setup.

Until then, ignorance is bliss.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Immutable Infrastructure: No SSH by falcolas on Monday July 13, 2015 @10:33AM (#9878281)
Well, ignorance also tends to fuel any number of flamewars...

In my experience with RDS as a MySQL admin, Amazon was not using sane defaults for quite some time, which resulted in a remarkably non-performant product. Thankfully, they listened to feedback, so over the course of a few years the MySQL RDS instances started to become much more dependable and useful. I'd be happy to use one today, which is something I couldn't have said too long ago.

And even with RDS, having a DBA available (even just as a consultant) is still quite useful - it's unrealistic to expect your developers to write ideal SQL. You can get a long ways with RDS if your queries and schemas are well tuned.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Immutable Infrastructure: No SSH by mugsie on Monday July 13, 2015 @07:38AM (#9877458)
RDS is not "geo-redundant".

It is an multi-AZ DB, which is very different to multi-region. (Availability Zones (AZs) are within a DC, regions are separate DCs)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Immutable Infrastructure: No SSH by axelfontaine on Monday July 13, 2015 @08:06AM (#9877568)
"Availability Zones (AZs) are within a DC" => not really

See this Re:Invent 2014 talk about AWS Innovation At Scale http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamiltonReInvent... => Slide 9: "Each AZ is 1 or more DC, No data center is in two AZs, Some AZs have as many as 6 DCs"

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Immutable Infrastructure: No SSH by mugsie on Monday July 13, 2015 @08:29AM (#9877687)
Sorry - you are right, with the scale of Amazon they are within a region. But that is still not Geo-Redundant. If a hurricane takes out Virgina, you are still going to loose your data.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Immutable Infrastructure: No SSH by tgeek on Monday July 13, 2015 @09:41AM (#9877985)
AZ's are typically 5-15miles apart. Needs to be a pretty large hurricane that far in land to take out all the various datacenters.

Also, just to clarify, you can do multi-region RDS read-replicas for MySQL: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Immutable Infrastructure: No SSH by lamontcg on Monday July 13, 2015 @01:29PM (#9879570)
The Virginia DCs are in different flood plains and on different power grids. A hurricane remnant did hit the one year (2005 probably) and a tornado took out power to one of them.
[ Parent | on HN ]