Tag Archives: mySQL

Here at Layer 7, we’ve been really excited about Amazon’s Relational Data Service (RDS) ever since they announced it last month. RDS is basically a managed mySQL v5.1 instance running in the Amazon infrastructure. The point of RDS to provide another basic service that we all need all of the time, managed within the AWS ecosystem. It offers some great scaling options (in terms of instance sizing), but best of all, it provides automatic snapshoting of  database instances. This revolutionizes EC2 because it solves the nagging persistence problem that we all face when we terminate instances. We’ve all come up with clever ways of dealing with this using S3 and EBS,  but now it’s gotten much easier.

Since RDS is really mySQL under the covers, I had been hearing that it’s pretty easy to port to. We’ve been itching to play with it here, using Layer 7’s SecureSpan Gateway AMI that’s runs in EC2. Unfortunately, this Fall has been really busy, so none of us have had an opportunity to play with it until now.

The inimitable Jay Thorne, who is a musician first but holds down a day job here as Director of Development for the Tactical group, finally cleared an afternoon to put RDS through it’s paces. I had to step out for coffee with another of our execs, which turned into a longer-than-expected discussion. But by the time I got back, Jay was done: SecureSpan using persistent Amazon RDS storage. Hello, cloud registry/repository…

Here’s Jay’s summary, which I think speaks for itself:

Total elapsed time: 1.25 hours
Number of pdf documents read: 1
Number of web pages read: 3
Number of command copy/pastes from doc: 6
Number of dbs created by mistake until I got the zoning right: 2
Number of mistyped credentials until I learned to use a creds file: 7
Number of dumpfiles created source side: 1
Number of times I had to import to get it right: 1
Number of characters in the hostname of the db: 50
Number of hosts I put in the db firewall allow list: 1
Number of sets of user credentials I created: 1
Number of lines in our internal wiki article I wrote about this: 35
Number of bangs on the keyboard in frustration: 0