(With apologies to Noel Coward)
A couple of occurrences inspired this post, one was a recent meeting with a local hosting provider to discuss their Virtual Private Cloud (which turned out to be nothing of the sort) and the other was a post from the Percona team comparing performance & cost of databases in the cloud vs databases on a traditional SSD array.
To quickly summarise what is a well written and informed post, the basic premise is simple – EBS storage, even when clustered and running in RAID configuration has latency varience that makes it unsuitable for high thoughput applications.
What’s interesting (to me at least) is the comparison of cost of an SSD array which is written off at $4,000 per year vs the equivalent cloud storage for ~$3,000 per year and the immense difference in throughput on both systems. And this isn’t S3 storage – this is EBS and therefore applies equally to any disk intensive cloud server whether it be MySQL or Couch or similar.
Yes I am perfectly aware that part of the appeal of Cloud hosting is the freedom to scale but it’s interesting to see that, at some point that scaling has limits and introduces issues that do not exist in traditional big iron computing.
(Src: www.mysqlperformanceblog.com)
