• Overview
  • General
    • ACID and BASE: MySQL and NoSQL
    • Offloading Your Database
    • Greening Your Datacenter
    • Don't Let the Cloud Rain on Your Parade

Don't Let the Cloud Rain on Your Parade

High-Performance Apps Need Special Handling

Cloud computing is an appealing delivery model for IT services, typically involving over-the-Internet provisioning of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources. An analogy is often made with the electricity grid — it's always there, always on, you use as much as you need when you need it, and you pay for what you use. You don't need to set up and run your own generators or electrical distribution infrastructure. "The cloud" is hot for good reason.

Cloud-based deployment of your applications is often a great choice, depending on the details. But cloud computing relies on sharing of hardware, so the applications that work best in the cloud are those that don't "pin the needle" on CPU, memory, and I/O usage. Applications such as the MySQL database, caching, and the emerging set of NoSQL data stores work well in the cloud when high performance is not the main goal.

The Cloud Hates Databases

But what if your application demands extremely high performance and "pins the needle" on system resources? In that case a cloud-based deployment is likely to produce lousy performance and lousier economics. Users who have tried moving large MySQL databases to the cloud are often shocked by the performance degradation and the unnatural levels of sharding needed to claw their way back to acceptable performance, to say nohting of the price of so many cloud instances.

Effective Alternatives for High-Performance Apps

For demanding MySQL and memcached deployments, Schooner recommends a private cloud or a hybrid cloud that incorporates servers running SchoonerSQL™ or Membrain™. You or your MSP (managed service provider) will see that the hybrid approach using Schooner software delivers vastly better performance and hugely superior economics than a pure cloud such as Amazon Web Services. Contact Schooner to find out more.