MySQL or Pg in the cloud (as a service)?

[raindog308]

I need a database in the cloud.  I have various VPSes and I'd like to coordinate the jobs they run, so I thought I'd have each write to a central DB.  I'd also like to store config, capacity planning, etc. data there.  Small stuff - probably less than 500M for a long time.

 

MySQL (or Maria) or PostGreSQL would be ideal but I haven't written any code yet.  I do need it to be very available/reliable.

 

My concerns about self-hosting it on a VPS is high availability/single point of failure/security (MySQL open to the net, though I think MySQL allows you to limit connections from only certain IPs and if not I could do that with iptables).  I could cluster but I'm thinking there might be some sort of cloud-based service?  I don't mind paying some small amount per month.

 

AWS RDS (Amazon's hosted MySQL) is $18/month + storage/data at its cheapest (extra small tier), and that's more than I was thinking.

 

There's Amazon's SimpleDB and the free tier is enough I could probably run for a long time...that's another possibility though it's entirely proprietary: http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/pricing/   Hopefully there is a perl or python module.

 

My fallback would be something like MongoHQ or Amazon Dynamo.  I see this as more row-based data than document data though.  

 

[splitice]

Cloud based MySQL is quite difficult. It really doesn't scale horizontally (MySQL Cluster != MySQL horizontally) making it difficult to host in the cloud. That combined with the standard Database issues regarding workload optimization make it quite difficult to achieve, at-least for big clients (where any real money is).

 

[Francisco]

I think what @splitice is trying to say is that it isn't web scale.

Francisco

 

[raindog308]

Well, it can be - I heard a presentation from a Facebook engineer and they use MySQL very heavily, though it's hardly stock.

Ultimately I took the easy way out...realized I'd never actually signed up for AWS Free Tier so I that's a year of a Micro instance, which should be more than sufficient.  I can limit access with the AWS firewall rules to certain hosts.  

 

[tchen]

Facebooks' MySQL is only used as the SOR.  Queries and all that fun web-scale stuff is mostly cached, piped, and offloaded into a variety of fun and definitely not SQL stuff

 

[raindog308]

Actually, now that you mention it...in case anyone's interested, though a couple years old:

http://www.slideshare.net/mysqlops/facebook-architecture