Recently one of our prospective customers asked this question, “We use Amazon RDS for MySQL, Do we still need a MySQL Database Architect / DBA / Engineer? ” The quick answer is – Yes, you still need a MySQL DBA to solve problems which Amazon RDS or Amazon Aurora for MySQL cannot solve, We spend almost 6 hours in meeting, helping the customer to understand how cloud Database Infrastructure and Database as a Service (DBaaS) simplifies Database Infrastructure provisioning and rolling-out scalability and high availability solutions faster across multiple locations, This post is about how we think the corporations can benefit from Amazon RDS / Aurora and build highly responsive web-scale database infrastructure, we have also included the solutions which simplifies maximum ROI for the customers from their cloud database infrastructure, We as an full-service database infrastructure solutions provider strongly believe, Amazon RDS/Aurora roll-out has to be planned very well and uncontrolled database infrastructure operations on cloud does occasionally more harm than good, Thank you for taking time reading this post and positive / constructive comments are welcome:
What are the problems / challenges solved by Amazon RDS / Aurora ?
- Infrastructure independent – When you usually procure a server, You get CPU, memory and storage devices bundled but when you are deploying your Database infrastructure in Amazon RDS / Aurora, All the required system resources are available distributed (split apart), This means you are building MySQL infrastructure from the day one optimal, scalable, highly available, reliable and secured.
- Capacity planning and sizing – You are not spending days / weeks on logistics of Capacity planning and sizing .. When you need infrastructure to grow / scale-out, You have it available on-demand . This makes faster deployment possible !
- Built for planet-scale – Your database infrastructure is highly scalable (both vertically and horizontally) on Amazon RDS / Aurora, You don’t have to spend time / resources in planning scalability solutions of your MySQL infrastructure.
- Fully Automated Backup – Amazon RDS takes care of your MySQL backup, You don’t have to spend time in researching and deploying robust backup solutions, So more reliable DR (Maximum Reliability of MySQL infrastructure).
- Highly Available MySQL infrastructure – You can build synchronous / asynchronous replication solutions faster, across multiple geographies.. This means, You have multi-location MySQL replication for availability and scaling-out reads available on demand. Amazon RDS auto-failover solution provides maximum availability of your MySQL infrastructure.
- Self healing DBaaS – Amazon Aurora is designed to automatically detect database crashes and restart without the need for crash recovery or to rebuild the database cache. If the entire instance fails, Amazon Aurora will automatically fail over to one of up to 15 read replicas.
What are the problems your DBA(s) can solve ?
Most of the Sr. MySQL DBA(s) can help you in addressing the following concerns / requirements, We have intentionally strikethroughed the activities which Amazon RDS / Aurora can do for you:
- Logical and physical schema development (designing tables, indexes, datatypes etc.) and optimal SQL engineering.
- Performance diagnostics / forensics, audit, recommendations and tuning.
- Benchmarking MySQL for performance, scalability, high availability and capacity planning / sizing (uncontrolled Amazon RDS instances are suicidal !).
- MySQL index performance optimization.
- MySQL database archiving and partitioning, Bigger Amazon RDS / Aurora instances are expensive and operationally exhaustive, so plan how much data you want to retain in the primary database instance (Amazon RDS) and where / how do you want to archive the old data.
- Continuous(24*7) MySQL performance monitoring to troubleshoot proactively, Issues like MySQL deadlocks needs to be fixed before causing any major impact to the business.
Installation and configuration of MySQL / MariaDB.MySQL backup .MySQL scale-out / replication , sharding, clustering (High Availability solutions).MySQL / MariaDB upgrades.MySQL / MariaDB bug fixing.MySQL / MariaDB security.
Can you remove DBA function from your business ?
No, We don’t recommend any of our customers (past, present and prospective) to remove DBA function from their business, because Amazon RDS / Aurora is actually solving your operational challenges in the database infrastructure, but you still need MySQL / MariaDB Expertise (outsourced or in-house) to build an optimal and scalable (systems not designed for performance and scalability cannot be fixed by heavy infrastructure investments) database infrastructure operations.
How do we like to conclude this post ?
Amazon RDS/Aurora is built to enable your MySQL DBA(s) and improve their productivity, They address operational challenges in database infrastructure management, So combining Sr. DBA expertise with Amazon RDS will benefit your business in building planet-scale MySQL operations cost efficiently. Definitely one cannot replace other, Amazon RDS and seasoned DBA(s) co-exist for good.
