Article Written by
David Nettles and Kevin Dillon, 2nd Watch
With
AWS re:Invent 2017 still fresh on our minds, following is a recap of some of
the more significant product-related announcements made at the show:
Aurora
Multi-Master/Multi-Region
The concept of geographically
distributed databases with multiple masters has been a long-desired solution.
Why is this important? Having additional masters allows for database writes,
not just reads like the traditional read replicas that have been
available.
This feature also enables a true
multi-region, highly available solution that eliminates a single point of
failure and achieves optimum performance. Previously, third party tools like
Golden Gate and various log shipping approaches were required to accomplish
proper disaster recovery and high availability.
This will greatly simplify architectures for some that want to go
active-active across regions and not just availability zones. Additionally, it
will enable pilot light (and more advanced) DR scenarios for customers that are
not going to be using active-active configurations.
Aurora Serverless
Aurora
Serverless is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration for the Aurora MySQL and
PostgreSQL compatible database service, where the database will automatically
start up and scale up or down based on your application's capacity needs.
Traditionally,
Aurora RDS required changing the underlying instance type to scale for database
demand. This is a large benefit and cost saver for development, testing and QA
environments. Even more importantly, if your workload has large spikes in
demand, then auto-scaling is a game changer in the same way that EC2 auto
scaling enabled automated compute flexibility.
T2 Unlimited
T2
is one of the most popular instance types used by AWS customers. In the case of
frequent, small and inconsistent workloads, T2 is the best price and
performance option. However, one of the most common reasons that customers do
not heavily leverage T2 is due to concerns related to a sustained spike in load
that will deplete burstable credits and result in unrecoverable performance
degradation.
T2
unlimited solves this problem by essentially allowing unlimited surges over the
former limits. We expect more customers will adopt T2 for those inconsistent
workloads as a cost-effective solution.
Spot Capacity
Spot
instances are normally used as pools of compute that run standard AMIs and work
on datasets located outside of EC2. This is because the instances are
terminated when the spot price increases beyond your bid, and all data is
lost.
Now,
when AWS reclaims the capacity, the instance can essentially hibernate,
preserving the operating system and data, and start up again when the spot
pricing is favorable. This removes another impediment in the use of spot
capacity, and will be a large cost saver for environments that only need to be
temporarily available.
M5 Instance Type
Given
the large increase in performance of the newer processor generations, one can
see significant cost savings and performance improvements by migrating to a
smaller sized offering of the latest instance type that meets your
application's needs.
Newer
instance types can also offer higher network bandwidth as well, so don't put
off the adoption of the latest products if possible.
Inter-region Peering
It's
always been possible to establish peering relationships between VPCs in the
same region. Inter-region Peering uses AWS private links between VPCs in
different availability zones and does not transit the open internet,
eliminating VPNs, etc.
This
same feature is available inter-region, which makes multi-region designs
cleaner and easier to implement, without having to build and configure VPN
networking infrastructure to support it, which of course also needs monitoring,
patching, and other maintenance. It was
also announced that users of Direct Connect can now route traffic to almost
every AWS region from a single Direct Connect circuit.
There were a few other product announcements that we found interesting,
but we want to digest them a little longer before offering our assessments.
We'll follow-up on these in a subsequent article.
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About the Authors
David Nettles is a Solutions Architect at 2nd Watch, and Kevin Dillon is a Director and Solutions
Architecture at 2nd Watch.