[ralph]

Thanks seldo, interesting. Just been looking at a client's Amazon dashboard where they have a small set-up running, not something I normally deal with but I see their RDS is billing over 2e9 I/Os/month and ends up being a significant part of the non-fixed bit of their bill. I suspect their MySQL queries are doing table scans and building temporary tables for some of the queries; these would both up the I/O count as all RDS storage is EBS, even temporaries?

So if your MySQL storage is ephemeral how do you cope with outage? Replicate it off AWS?

[seldo]

I believe MySQL's working directory is on EBS, so yes, even temporary tables would be on EBS -- don't quote me on that, though.

Re: outages, we use multiple replicated servers in different availability zones -- an outage is usually (though not always!) limited to a single zone. For a region-wide outage, we have emergency backups being sent to a different AWS region (east -> west), and if shit completely hits the fan we have off-AWS backups.