Efficient MySQL Performance

Chapter 10. MySQL in the Cloud

MySQL in the cloud is fundamentally the same MySQL that you know and love (or know and tolerate). In the cloud, the best practices and techniques detailed in the previous nine chapters are not only true but eminently true because cloud providers charge for every byte and millisecond of work. Performance is money in the cloud. To recap the previous nine chapters:

• Performance is query response time (Chapter 1).

• Indexes are the key to performance (Chapter 2).

• Less data is better—for both storing and accessing (Chapter 3).

• Access patterns allow or inhibit performance (Chapter 4).

• Sharding is necessary to scale out writes and storage (Chapter 5).

• Server metrics reveal how the workload affects MySQL (Chapter 6).

• Replication lag is data loss and must be avoided (Chapter 7).

• Transactions affect row locking and undo logging (Chapter 8).

• Other challenges exist—even in the cloud (Chapter 9).

If you embrace and apply all those details, MySQL will execute the application workload with remarkable performance regardless of location: in the cloud, on premise, or anywhere.

For the sake of saving you time, I wish it were that simple—optimize the workload and you’re done—but MySQL in the cloud raises unique considerations. The goal is to know and mitigate these cloud considerations so that you can focus on MySQL, not the cloud. After all, the cloud is nothing special: behind the proverbial curtain, it’s physical servers in a data center running ...