In The Works – Amazon Aurora Serverless

[superasn]

Last week I created a small framework called lambdaphp[1].

My aim was to host a Wordpress or Laravel site on aws lambda without paying any monthly hosting charges. I got everything running (sessions, fs, request, etc) except of course I still had to use RDS and I think this takes care of it too. So now I can expect to run a full site which is only billed by the amount of resources consumed.

Of course my project was just for my own amusement but I think this is the way how it's going to be done soon or where Aws is heading. Seems pretty nifty!

[1] https://github.com/san-kumar/lambdaphp

[meritt]

AWS will likely add PHP support, yes but they absolutely will not do what this project does: Running a NodeJS http server that launches a PHP binary and runs local scripts.

[sologoub]

Really wish "serverless" also meant that it can work with AWS Lambda efficiently. As is, each function would try to open a connection, making the overall overhead extremely high and stressing DBs.

[k__]

Can't you open the connection outside of the function?

So as long as the function is hot, it won't reconnect.

[inopinatus]

Are you sure? That is, do you have specific knowledge of the implementation? Because:

> The endpoint is a simple proxy that routes your queries to a rapidly scaled fleet of database resources.

That doesn’t seem to preclude a multiplexing proxy a la PgBouncer.

[nleach]

Is that true? The default limit on concurrent function executions is 1000. The existing Aurora (MySQL) should be able to handle cycling through those connections without issue.

[brootstrap]

3 months later... AWS announces serverless, databaseless database system.

[ignoramous]

Which might be when their marketing team decides to re-launch S3?

[maxxxxx]

And then "cloudless"?

[dhd415]

Given the existing architecture of Aurora, the independent scaling of CPU and storage seems pretty straightforward. What is much harder to scale up and (especially) down is a warmed-up buffer pool which is critical for consistent query performance. I wonder if that is what they mean in the article when they say that scaling happens on a "pool of 'warm' instances". If so, I'd be very interested in more details on how that works.

[bpicolo]

I wonder how the cost differs, given they have to keep hot standbys? Perhaps a lot of behind-the scenes prediction to make it cost effective? Takes a while to create a standby from scratch for large DBs.

Either way, sweet tech. Seems like a fun thing to build

[zwily]

Aurora doesn’t work that way - it has one storage layer shared by all the nodes. Adding a new replica is very fast no matter your data set size.

[mrep]

Is this for the master or the read replicas?

If it is for the master, that would be amazing and I would wonder if you can scale up past the 1 instance size max (currently r4.16xl)

[drej]

Cool... but.. how?

[strong_silent_t]

So, if I'm understanding right, it is using the database server instances as the current Aurora does. You just aren't responsible for managing them, the service makes those decisions within the spectrum of Aurora's capabilities and can change it in a very small time increment.

EDIT: pretty impressive though, looking at James Hamilton's criteria for "Automatic Management and Provisioning" here: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/... , I think this addresses everything database related, as long as you are under the maximum capacity of Aurora.

[odammit]

Aurora already spreads each "10GB chunk of your database volume is replicated six ways, across three Availability Zones." It looks like from the diagram they are taking advantage of that fact and spinning down the instances that serve off those "disks"

[jeffbarr]

Read the post!