Episode 13: Serverlessly Storing my Dad Jokes in a Dadabase

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