Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. One of the common questions that we get is “What is Multi-AZ and how it’s different from Read Replica, do I need both?”.  I have tried to answer this question in this blog post and it depends on your application needs. Are you looking for High Availability (HA), read scalability … or both?

Before we go to into detail, let me explain two common terms used with Amazon AWS.

Region – an AWS region is a separate geographical area like US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), EU (London) etc. Each AWS Region has multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones.

Availability Zone (AZ) – AZ is simply one or more data …

For the same customer I am exploring ZFS for backups, the twin server is using regular LVM and XFS. On this twin, I have setup mylvmbackup for a more conservative backup approach. I quickly found some odd behaviors, the backup was taking much longer than what I was expecting. It is not the first time I saw that, but here it was obvious. So I recorded some metrics, bi from vmstat and percent of cow space used from lvs during a backup. Cow space is the Copy On Write buffer used by LVM to record the modified pages like they were at the beginning of the snapshot. Upon reads, LVM must scan the list to verify that there’s no newer version. Here’s the other details about the backup:

• Filesystem: 2TB, xfs
• Snapsize: 60GB
• Amount to backup: ~600GB
• Backup tool: mylvmbackup
• Compressor: pbzip2

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