MySQL in the Cloud - High Performance MySQL - page 600

instructions, and as such, it shouldn't have a noticeable virtualization overhead or much
memory traffic. Thus, the explanation for our results is probably as follows: the Cisco
server's CPUs are a couple of years old, and are slower than the EC2 servers. But for
more complex tasks such as running a database server, the overhead of virtualization
places the EC2 servers at a disadvantage. It's not always easy to distinguish between
slow CPUs, slow memory access, and virtualization overhead, but in this instance the
differences seem a bit clearer.
MySQL Database as a Service (DBaaS)
Installing MySQL on a cloud-hosted server isn't the only option for using MySQL in
the cloud. More and more companies are offering the database itself as a cloud resource,
dubbing it Database as a Service (DBaaS, or sometimes DaaS). This means that you can
get a database in the cloud somewhere and leave the actual running of the service to
others. Although we've spent most of our time examining IaaS in this chapter, the IaaS
market is rapidly becoming commoditized, and we expect that in the future a lot of
emphasis will shift to DBaaS instead. There are several DBaaS providers at the time of
writing.
Amazon RDS
We've seen much more deployment on Amazon's Relational Database Service (RDS)
than any of the other DBaaS offerings. Amazon RDS isn't just a MySQL-compatible
service; it actually is MySQL, so it's completely compatible with your own MySQL
server 10 and can serve as a drop-in replacement. We can't say for sure, but like most
people we believe that RDS is hosted on an EC2 machine backed by EBS volumes—
Amazon has not officially confirmed the underlying technologies, but when you get to
know RDS well, it seems pretty obvious that it's just MySQL, EC2, and EBS.
Amazon does all the system administration for you. You don't have access to the EC2
machine; you have access credentials to log into MySQL, and that's it. You can create
databases, insert data, and so on. You're not locked in; if you want to, you can export
the data and move it elsewhere, and you can create volume snapshots and mount them
on other machines, too.
RDS comes with some restrictions to keep you from inspecting or interfering with
Amazon's management of the server or the host instance. There are some privilege
restrictions, for example. You can't use SELECT INTO OUTFILE , FILE() , LOAD DATA
INFILE , or any other method of accessing the server's filesystem through MySQL. You
can't do anything related to replication, and you can't escalate your privileges to grant
yourself these rights, either. Amazon has taken measures such as placing triggers on
10. Unless you're using an alternative storage engine or some other nonstandard modification to MySQL.