Screaming in the Cloud

Aurora, from Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a MySQL-compatible service for complex database structures. It offers capabilities and opportunities. But with Aurora, you’re putting a lot of trust in AWS to “just work” in ways not traditional to relational database services (RDS).
David Torgerson, Principal DevOps Engineer at Lucidchart, is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and virtually impossible to Google. He shares Lucidchart’s experience with migrating away from a traditional RDS to Aurora to free up developer time.
Some of the highlights of the show include:

Trade off of making someone else partially responsible for keeping your site up
Lucidchart’s overall database costs decreased 25% after switching to Aurora
Aurora unknowns: What is an I/Op in Aurora? When you write one piece of data, does it count as six I/Ops?
Multi-master Aurora is coming for failover time and disaster recovery purposes
Aurora drawbacks: No dedicated DevOps, increased failover time, and misleading performance speed
Providers offer ways to simplify your business processes, but not ways to get out of using their products due to vendor and platform lock-in
Lucidchart is skeptical about Aurora Serverless; will use or not depending on performance

Links:

Corey's architecture diagram on AWS
Lucidchart
Lucidchart’s Data Migration to Amazon Aurora
Preview of Amazon Aurora Multi-master Sign Up
This is My Architecture
re:Invent
Digital Ocean

Show Notes

Aurora, from Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a MySQL-compatible service for complex database structures. It offers capabilities and opportunities. But with Aurora, you’re putting a lot of trust in AWS to “just work” in ways not traditional to relational database services (RDS).

David Torgerson, Principal DevOps Engineer at Lucidchart, is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and virtually impossible to Google. He shares Lucidchart’s experience with migrating away from a traditional RDS to Aurora to free up developer time.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

  • Trade off of making someone else partially responsible for keeping your site up
  • Lucidchart’s overall database costs decreased 25% after switching to Aurora
  • Aurora unknowns: What is an I/Op in Aurora? When you write one piece of data, does it count as six I/Ops?
  • Multi-master Aurora is coming for failover time and disaster recovery purposes
  • Aurora drawbacks: No dedicated DevOps, increased failover time, and misleading performance speed
  • Providers offer ways to simplify your business processes, but not ways to get out of using their products due to vendor and platform lock-in
  • Lucidchart is skeptical about Aurora Serverless; will use or not depending on performance

Links:

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What is Screaming in the Cloud?

Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn features conversations with domain experts in the world of Cloud Computing. Topics discussed include AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and the "why" behind how businesses are coming to think about the Cloud.