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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

RDS is pretty expensive for what you get. You can't restore to a running instance from snapshots, you get very little control over the environment, and you can't replicate between geographic regions (only availability zones).

I know you said you're a two man shop, but in this case it may make more sense to leverage other IaaS DB services instead of RDS.

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I am not sure what you mean by "You can't restore to a running instance from snapshots" cause, well, I've done it a few times.

Could you expand a bit maybe?

My apologies. I should've said "to an existing instance."

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_R...

"You must create a DB snapshot before you can restore a DB instance from one. When you restore the DB instance, you provide the name of the DB snapshot to restore from, and then provide a name for the new DB instance that is created from the restore. You cannot restore from a DB snapshot to an existing DB instance; a new DB instance is created when you restore."

I have also used their snapshots with success

"you get very little control over the environment" also seems spurious. You get parameter groups to control just about everything you can from a standalone mysql instance. logs or things that load from disk (LOAD DATA ...) are the only things you can't touch, but a small price to pay for automated backups, failover and scaling (both up AND down...)

Sorry if I wasn't specific enough.

In my opinion, you don't get enough control over the environment for what you're paying on a per hour basis. Automated backups? Great, they aren't that difficult to being with. Failover? Sure, within the same AZ, when you need to be doing it between datacenters. Scaling? I will grant that it scales up and down fast automagically.

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