Recently I was doing some small testing by using EC2 instances on AWS and I noticed the execution time and performance highly depend on which time of the day I am running my scripts. I was using t3.xlarge instance type as I didn’t need many CPUs and memory for my tests, but from time to time I planned to use all the resources for a short time (few minutes), and this is when I noticed the difference.

First, let’s see what AWS says about T3 instances:

T3 instances start in Unlimited mode by default, giving users the ability to sustain high CPU performance over any desired time frame while keeping cost as low as possible.

In theory, I should not have any issues or performance differences. I have also monitored the CPU credit balance and there was no correlation between the balance and the performance at all, and because these were unlimited instances the balance should not have any impact.

If you are using large EBS GP2 volumes for MySQL (i.e. 10TB+) on AWS EC2, you can increase performance and save a significant amount of money by moving to local SSD (NVMe) instance storage. Interested? Then read on for a more detailed examination of how to achieve cost-benefits and increase performance from this implementation.

EBS vs Local instance store

We have heard from customers that large EBS GP2 volumes can be affected by short term outages—IO “stalls” where no IO is going in or out for a couple of minutes. Statistically, with so many disks in disk arrays (which back EBS volumes) we can expect frequent disk failures. If we allocate a very large EBS GP2 volume, i.e. 10Tb+, hitting such failure events can be common.

In the case of MySQL/InnoDB, such an IO “stall” will be obvious, particularly with the highly loaded system where MySQL needs to do physical IO. During the stall, you will see all write queries …

This blog post will give a brief overview of Amazon RDS capabilities and limitations, and how Percona Support can help you succeed in your Amazon RDS deployments.

One of the common questions that we get from customers and prospective customers is about Percona Support with Amazon RDS. As many companies have shifted to the cloud, or are considering how to do so, it’s natural to try to understand the limitations inherent in different deployment strategies.

Why Use Amazon RDS?

As more companies move to using the cloud, we’ve seen a shift towards work models in technical teams that require software developers to take on more operational duties than they have traditionally. This makes it essential to abstract infrastructure so it can be interacted with as code, whether through automation or APIs. Amazon RDS presents a compelling DBaaS product with significant flexibility while maintaining ease of deployment.

Use …

Originally, the goal of the benchmark is to compare performance and price/performance of Amazon RDS (Aurora) and MySQL server running on an EC2 instance. MySQL Versions MySQL 5.6 on RDS Aurora on RDS MySQL 5.6 community version on EC2 MySQL 5.7 community version on EC2 Sysbench Test Primary Key lookup queries OLTP workload with mix […]

The post RDS vs. Aurora vs. EC2 Benchmark appeared first on TwinDB.

September 3, 2014 By Severalnines

Running your database cluster on AWS is a great way to adapt to changing workloads by adding/removing instances, or by scaling up/down each instance. At Severalnines, we talk much more about scale-out than scale up, but there are cases where you might want to scale up an instance instead of scaling out. 

In this post, we’ll show you how to change instance sizes with respect to RAM, CPU and IOPS, and how to tune your Galera nodes accordingly. Moreover, this post assumes that instances are launched using Amazon VPC.

When do we need to upgrade an instance?

You typically need to upgrade an instance when you run out of server resources. This includes CPU, RAM, storage capacity, disk throughput and bandwidth. You must allow enough headroom for …

This is the story of cold blocks and mismatched instances and how they will cause you pain and cost you money until you understand why. Most of the clients that we support run on the Amazon cloud using either RDS … Continue reading →

Join 25,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Are you serious about backups? If you’re just using Amazon EBS snapshots, that may not be sufficient. There’s a good chance it won’t protect you against your next data loss. That’s why I like to have a few different types of backups Also: 5 more […]

If you use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), you are always given choices of AMIs (by default; there are plenty of other AMIs available for your base-os): Amazon Linux AMI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Server and Ubuntu. In terms of cost, the Amazon Linux AMI is the cheapest, followed by SUSE then RHEL. 

I use EC2 a lot for testing, and recently had to pay a “RHEL tax” as I needed to run a RHEL environment. For most uses I’m sure you can be satisfied by the Amazon Linux AMI. The last numbers suggest Amazon Linux is #2 in terms of usage on EC2.

Anyway, recently Amazon Linux AMI came out with the 2014.03 release (see release notes). You can install MySQL …

Troubleshooting MySQL on Amazon can be a real test of patience. There are quite a few different things to watch out for in terms of connectivity & networking. Sometimes a checklist can help. Join 16,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Here’s my exhaustive list of things that can block you. 1. Be […]

November 19, 2013 By Severalnines

The Severalnines team is pleased to announce the release of ClusterControl 1.2.4. This release contains key new features along with performance improvements and bug fixes.

We have outlined some of the key features below. For additional details about the release:

• 1.2.4 ChangeLog
• Documentation
• Upgrade instructions
  • Manual upgrade instructions
  • …