MySQL Cloud Database

March 16th, 2011

Our Xeround test… failure and old fashioned solution

With the growth of the amount of beta users and the size of each one we realized our database infrastructure was not scalable enough. With a growth addition of nearly 3 million extra interactions on the platform we hit the top. Our servers went out for 10 minutes in January and we had to act fast.

Xeround logo Scaling a a database on the Amazon EC2 platform is a challenge, it’s not like all other cloud services: just pump it online and ‘they will store it’ looking at how we could store billions of new database records every month in a more scalable solutions we found Xeround. This new startup wants to be the database cloud storage in MySQL format. Seems a dream came true: just pump a database over to Xeround and it will automatically scale over multiple EC2 instances.

Our try with the very helpful team of Xeround we got a little more than the normal 500MB beta space and we pumped a 5GB database over to give it a serious try. Growing it with 1GB each week using test-scripts we found it did not yet have the stability we require.

So back to the traditional ‘split them up’ solution and we now implemented a more standard solution of spreading the clients over instances and moving them around based on the volume they need. It seems to be a bit low-tech, but besides Xeround there does not seem any other economically interesting cloud database solution out there.

Our guess is that this infrastructure should get us well underway in 2011 and by the time Xeround irons out the issues we can give that a try again. But if you are looking for a database in the cloud, try them out, it might work for you. Every cloud application is different.

For our beta users… you will not notice anything, and no need to change any scripts or code. The only think you hopefully have seen is… a faster responding application.

Liran Zelkha

Try out ScaleBase – it can give you the scaling and availability you’re looking for in MySQL
Anonymous

Hi Liran, seems we are bit late for ScaleBase since we actually changed the code and are now able to split clients over servers. But I will forward you tip to the rest of the team for future ideas.
Liran Zelkha

Hi Reedge, you can also use our solution when you want to aggregate info from the multiple shards you created (let’s say for BI or management).
Anonymous

Ahh that is interesting so it also works the other way around. So large clients that do not fit on one indivdual server can then use ScaleBase. Thanks for the tip.
http://twitter.com/itamarhaber Itamar Haber

@reedge – thanks for the effort and for participating in our Beta. The learning experience was mutual and as we’re in beta we’re still ironing out the kinks and squashing bugs. We do expect to launch our commercial service this summer, by which time we expect to have resolved all issues. I hope to see you amongst our customers in the future.

Itamar Haber (AVP Ops & Solutions @ Xeround)