SCALE13X – My thoughts on another great year

I can’t remember how many SCALE’s I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at, but the events keep on getting bigger and better (I think SCALE might have even outgrown the Hilton LAX).

jIsNOgOm.jpgHowever, at most of these events, they’re not just for talks, but the enriching hallway track. From a community standpoint, I think SCALE is probably the most important event in North America (mainly because of price; OSCON is firmly on my calendar too, but costs a lot more). It’s EU counterpart is FOSDEM in Brussels.

I spoke about MySQL in the Hosted Cloud, focusing largely on Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, RackSpace Cloud Databases, and a little hint of the HP Helion Cloud offering (I’m not sure they’re really serious about offering a DBaaS).

People did ask about options of having MySQL or MariaDB in Azure cloud, and the quickest response to that is ClearDB. They don’t offer MariaDB, but you can get hosted MySQL. Its getting common for WordPress sites (at least you can see the trends on Twitter pickup), but I’m not sure how many take the Azure cloud too seriously for MySQL-ecosystem related deployments.

It was also important to focus on some new entrants, namely being offered in Red Hat’s OpenShift (MySQL and MariaDB), Pivotal CloudFoundry MySQL (which is really MariaDB Galera Cluster!), and even a Google Compute Engine “click-to-deploy” app offering Percona XtraDB Cluster (so not managed like the typical solutions above).

I touched on the usual bewares of smaller companies in this space — we’ve seen Xeround close its doors with 2 weeks notice, and GenieDB had a lot of marketing but has gone silent for the better part of last year.

Generally, people wanted an answer to the most popular question: Do you use RDS versus hosting MySQL in EC2 (and their equivalents)? A lot of this depends on what you have as employees. If you’re a startup with 2-3 employees, it probably makes a lot of sense to start in a hosted environment (that tends to be managed, and you can get support for it if need be). As you grow and hire your first DBA, you might want to migrate to using a regular MySQL install — after all, you get a lot more control, configurability, manageability, monitoring, storage engines, and different HA options.

The talk ended with a good discussion around if MariaDB Corporation should also offer a DBaaS — since we know MariaDB, why not allow it to be a hosted option? It’s definitely gotten me thinking; after all we see companies like MongoLab/ObjectRocket do this in the MongoDB space quite successfully…