High Performance MySQL, 3rd Edition

Chapter 13. MySQL in the Cloud

It should be no surprise that many people are running MySQL in the cloud, sometimes at a very large scale. In our experience, most of them are using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform: specifically Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, and, to a lesser extent, the Relational Database Service (RDS).

One way to frame the discussion about MySQL in the cloud is to divide it into two rough categories:

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

IaaS is cloud infrastructure for hosting your own MySQL server. You can purchase a virtual server resource in the cloud and use it to install and run your MySQL instance. You can configure MySQL and the operating system as you wish, but you have no access or insight into the underlying physical hardware.

DBaaS (Database as a Service)

MySQL itself is the cloud-managed resource. You receive access credentials to a MySQL server. You can configure some of MySQL’s settings, but you have no access or insight into the underlying operating system or virtual server instance. An example is Amazon RDS running MySQL. Some of these services aren’t really stock MySQL, but they are compatible with the MySQL protocol and query language.

We focus most on the first category: cloud hosting on platforms such as AWS, Rackspace Cloud, and Joyent.^[199] There are many good resources for learning how to deploy and manage MySQL and the resources needed to run it, and there are too many platforms for us to cover them ...