5 ms·

Amazon's Aurora databases seem to be solving the same problem, and are MySQL or Postgres compatible to boot.

by snikch 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
manacit 10y ago
Aurora is a 'better MySQL mousetrap', IMO. This is a globally-available, nearly-CAP-beating datastore that powers one of the biggest websites on the internet. It's not quite apples and oranges, but this is definitely a different problem they are solving.
- abalone 10y ago
  That's vague. AWS also powers huge websites and Amazon is recommending Aurora as the "default choice" for most workloads.[1] There are certainly significant architectural differences but I would say we can definitely make a direct practical comparison. [1] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2953299/cloud-computing/amazon-takes-on-mysql-with-aurora.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2953299/cloud-computing...
  - cobookman 10y ago
    If Aurora powers huge websites, spanner is for ginormous websites. Think a multiplier to netflix's database needs.
    - dzhiurgis 10y ago
      Curious to know what are Netflix's needs for relational database? Doesn't strike me as a business with complex logic.
      - cobookman 10y ago
        I'd assume they keep track of who watches what for their 'continue watching series...' pain. Netflix was given as an example of scale. I guess for another example, spanner could be used to store every visa transaction
      - threeseed 10y ago
        Netflix mainly uses Cassandra as their database. And their needs are reasonably complex. They use machine learning and big data analytics to generate the list of videos that you should be watching. In order for those to work they need to capture a whole raft of end user metrics e.g. at what point you paused video X.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
xapata 10y ago
Aurora's other zone replicas are read-only. Probably no atomic clocks and GPS for time synchronization. To be fair, Spanner's cross-region service is coming "later 2017".
johnsmith21006 10y ago
It is not close to equivalent. But I do want to get a better feel for if Google really has figured how to do basically the impossible. I want to see if this truly scales horizontally but of it does then competitors better hope for a much more detailed paper :)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jack9 10y ago
  > It is not close to equivalent. It's equivalent, with different (unknown) constraints. Aurora is specifically for scaling workloads in the same way. You can say it's horizontal (machine) over vertical (resource) but it's all a matter of accounting. The big nono is the Spanner pricepoint. I will stick with Aurora for scaling based on traffic I use, over pricey timeslices. You would have to have quite a load to justify the switch from cheaper de jour solutions right now (AWS). Relying on the few that do, is a risk.
tedd4u 10y ago
Aurora is very cool but won't help you much after you vertically scale your master and still need more write capacity. With Cloud Spanner you get horizontal write scalability out of the box. Critical difference.
- abalone 10y ago
  So if I'm understanding you, with Aurora all writes go to one master and you're constrained by the biggest instance AWS offers. Is that right? Do you have a sense of what that limit is? There's a pretty big price difference between Spanner and Aurora at the entry level so it's useful to explore this.
  - edaemon 10y ago
    Yes, Aurora has a single write master, though it does have automatic write failover -- i.e. if the Aurora primary dies, one of your read replicas is promoted to the primary and reads/writes are directed to the new instance. That does constrain your primary's capabilities to the largest instance size (currently a db.r3.8xlarge). I don't have a good idea what the upper limit is for an Aurora database setup.
    - macintux 10y ago
      How does Aurora know that the primary is dead? Automatic failover is problematic in a distributed system.
      - xapata 10y ago
        Yeah, the latency on that failover isn't specified.
        edaemon 10y ago
        Do you mean the amount of time it takes to initiate a failover or the amount of time for a failover to complete? For the former, I don't think they specify beyond "automatic". For the latter, "service is typically restored in less than 120 seconds, and often less than 60 seconds": http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Aurora.Managing.html#Aurora.Managing.FaultTolerance http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Aurora...
rattray 10y ago
While Aurora doesn't provide true horizontal scalability, the same-node scalability seems so strong it might allow many companies to stay single-node for quite a while. For example, see this benchmark: http://2ndwatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Graph-3.jpg http://2ndwatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Graph-3.jpg from this article: http://2ndwatch.com/blog/benchmarking-amazon-aurora/ http://2ndwatch.com/blog/benchmarking-amazon-aurora/ Thoughts?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

Amazon's Aurora databases seem to be solving the same problem, and are MySQL or Postgres compatible to boot.

by snikch 10y ago

Amazon's Aurora databases seem to be solving the same problem, and are MySQL or Postgres compatible to boot.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

manacit 10y ago

Aurora is a 'better MySQL mousetrap', IMO. This is a globally-available, nearly-CAP-beating datastore that powers one of the biggest websites on the internet. It's not quite apples and oranges, but this is definitely a different problem they are solving.

abalone 10y ago
That's vague. AWS also powers huge websites and Amazon is recommending Aurora as the "default choice" for most workloads.[1] There are certainly significant architectural differences but I would say we can definitely make a direct practical comparison. [1] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2953299/cloud-computing/amazon-takes-on-mysql-with-aurora.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2953299/cloud-computing...
- cobookman 10y ago
  If Aurora powers huge websites, spanner is for ginormous websites. Think a multiplier to netflix's database needs.
  - dzhiurgis 10y ago
    Curious to know what are Netflix's needs for relational database? Doesn't strike me as a business with complex logic.
    - cobookman 10y ago
      I'd assume they keep track of who watches what for their 'continue watching series...' pain. Netflix was given as an example of scale. I guess for another example, spanner could be used to store every visa transaction
    - threeseed 10y ago
      Netflix mainly uses Cassandra as their database. And their needs are reasonably complex. They use machine learning and big data analytics to generate the list of videos that you should be watching. In order for those to work they need to capture a whole raft of end user metrics e.g. at what point you paused video X.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

xapata 10y ago

Aurora's other zone replicas are read-only. Probably no atomic clocks and GPS for time synchronization. To be fair, Spanner's cross-region service is coming "later 2017".

johnsmith21006 10y ago

It is not close to equivalent. But I do want to get a better feel for if Google really has figured how to do basically the impossible. I want to see if this truly scales horizontally but of it does then competitors better hope for a much more detailed paper :)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jack9 10y ago
> It is not close to equivalent. It's equivalent, with different (unknown) constraints. Aurora is specifically for scaling workloads in the same way. You can say it's horizontal (machine) over vertical (resource) but it's all a matter of accounting. The big nono is the Spanner pricepoint. I will stick with Aurora for scaling based on traffic I use, over pricey timeslices. You would have to have quite a load to justify the switch from cheaper de jour solutions right now (AWS). Relying on the few that do, is a risk.

tedd4u 10y ago

Aurora is very cool but won't help you much after you vertically scale your master and still need more write capacity. With Cloud Spanner you get horizontal write scalability out of the box. Critical difference.

abalone 10y ago
So if I'm understanding you, with Aurora all writes go to one master and you're constrained by the biggest instance AWS offers. Is that right? Do you have a sense of what that limit is? There's a pretty big price difference between Spanner and Aurora at the entry level so it's useful to explore this.
- edaemon 10y ago
  Yes, Aurora has a single write master, though it does have automatic write failover -- i.e. if the Aurora primary dies, one of your read replicas is promoted to the primary and reads/writes are directed to the new instance. That does constrain your primary's capabilities to the largest instance size (currently a db.r3.8xlarge). I don't have a good idea what the upper limit is for an Aurora database setup.
  - macintux 10y ago
    How does Aurora know that the primary is dead? Automatic failover is problematic in a distributed system.
    - xapata 10y ago
      Yeah, the latency on that failover isn't specified.
      - edaemon 10y ago
        Do you mean the amount of time it takes to initiate a failover or the amount of time for a failover to complete? For the former, I don't think they specify beyond "automatic". For the latter, "service is typically restored in less than 120 seconds, and often less than 60 seconds": http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Aurora.Managing.html#Aurora.Managing.FaultTolerance http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Aurora...

rattray 10y ago

While Aurora doesn't provide true horizontal scalability, the same-node scalability seems so strong it might allow many companies to stay single-node for quite a while. For example, see this benchmark: http://2ndwatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Graph-3.jpg http://2ndwatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Graph-3.jpg from this article: http://2ndwatch.com/blog/benchmarking-amazon-aurora/ http://2ndwatch.com/blog/benchmarking-amazon-aurora/ Thoughts?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]