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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

(Disclaimer: I work for AWS.)

Can you tell us more about the use case? I'm not sure I understand the need here, or how it might improve your work patterns.

Also, note that this is an export feature, not a backup/restore feature. Aurora already has native backup/restore: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide...

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I've run into this need. Generally, you have a DB, you just want to bring it back to a point in time. As RDS instances can be part of a bigger setup, it's not always trivial to point your application at a different instance, so re-using an existing instance can be helpful.

Amazon Aurora Backtrack?

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/05/amazon-au...

Thats a great feature, if you're on Aurora. In my case these were MySQL RDS instances created ranging from 2012 and beyond. Migration of the app to Aurora is possible (after testing), but it would be a much larger change.

We recommend you do migrate - lots of great features in Aurora while remaining 100% MySQL compatible.

(EDIT: I should have said "wire and protocol compatible" as opposed to "100%". I regret the error.)

Would you sign your first born over to me on that promise? Obviously I'm joking, but i have in the past got nervous that there might be issues with this claim. I.e. previously i found that the MySQL welcome banner that Aurora gave me claimed it was a very specific version, but when i tested a bug fixed in a previous MySQL version (a weird edge cases for us around transactions) it failed the test. I'm worried that while the goal is for it to be 100% compatible, the number is closer to 99.X% and that means the migration isn't a small amount of work to verify.

Definitely send us a support ticket if you find a regression in Aurora/MySQL's behavior for a specific point release.

That is what I did back then, i actually got a great response and the explanation of why this issue existed was valid. Not a real concern, I just don't love the way Amazon suggests "use Aurora" all the time when the real issue from the customers perspective is "Other non-Aurora RDS offerings are lacking features, and we have to keep using them - at least for now".

Aurora compatibility with MySQL is great. But as any 100% compatibility claims this one is bullshit. You can get close but you never really quite hit 100%

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide...

The following features are supported in MySQL 5.7.12 but are currently not supported in Aurora MySQL 5.7:

Group replication plugin

Increased page size

InnoDB buffer pool loading at startup

InnoDB full-text parser plugin

Multisource replication

Online buffer pool resizing

Password validation plugin

Query rewrite plugins

Replication filtering

The CREATE TABLESPACE SQL statement

X Protocol

Those are all irrelevant for Aurora - which is a fully hosted, natively replicated database.

This is something we face as well on the postgresql side. We don't want to migrate.

And we want to maintain large number of multi-terabyte backups (that are RESTORABLE) in Glacier for compliance reasons.

There is orders of magnitude of cost difference between snappshots and Glacier. Also i cant maintain beyond 30 days.

We have a few mysql instances where we only need them for a few days a month (maybe a week). Because a stopped instance will start automatically after 7 days we delete the instance and do a final snapshot.

When we restore we have to go through the process of configuring a new instance from that snapshot. Where you have to select the security group, availability zone, set it to not public (which btw revert to yes once you select some availability zone) etc.

This process is rather error prone and honestly annoying if you do it multiple times.

I am imagining a scenario where the instance is shut down and restored to a point-in-time snapshot. The UI suggests this is possible based on the verbage, and this is an expectation of lots of other DB management tools.

At the moment, when you try and click 'Restore to point in time' it's just taking you through the new instance wizard with the snapshot being used as the initial dataset. Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/vBiqgJg.png -- the 'restore to point in time' is extremely misleading.

My specific uses case would be for PostgreSQL and/or MySQL, I do not use nor have I tried Aurora.

I can't get the S3 export to work either. Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/nabbsMr.png

I need to grab a single row out of a snapshot from our staging database. So far I have restored the DB once and our QA team was able to reproduce a bug. They began testing prior to me pulling the data out, so now I am re-cloning an instance to fetch the unmolested data from that DB.

tl;dr - allow me restore a snapshot like every other piece of software that has a snapshotting component. caveat is that this will likely need to be an offline process, but as long as that is noted and clear, that is going to help a LOT of people out.

> allow me restore a snapshot like every other piece of software that has a snapshotting component. caveat is that this will likely need to be an offline process, but as long as that is noted and clear, that is going to help a LOT of people out.

We have this in Aurora already. If you migrate to Aurora (which is MySQL/Postgres compatible), you'll get this functionality out of the box.

Is there a 'clone this database, but as an aurora database, and make it a replica that can eventually become standalone' feature?

Most of my RDS usage is for my clients, so it is not always feasable to up and forklift them to a different database platform.

I would imagine though that AWS is not going to invest a lot of time and energy into improving the developer ergonomics and UX of non-Aurora databases?

I can't think of anyone who would choose Aurora right off the bat -- becuase it's one click closer to complete vendor lock-in and away from OSS.

We have migration instructions in the Aurora documentation. See, for example: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide... (MySQL) or https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide... (Postgres).

Again, both are compatible with the open-source versions, so you can export your data if you need to via the standard tooling.

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