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AllSystemsDown's avatar

Amazon RDS w/Forge

I'm trying to decide on what direction to take in terms of database. Does anyone use the Amazon RDS instance as opposed to the MySQL instance that is used within the Forge EC2 deployment?

I'm thinking of that separation of services, which is better for resource allocation, troubleshooting and logging, etc.

Can anyone provide any personal experience using RDS and if you'd recommend it? Any ideas and thoughts or advice is welcome.

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Defrag's avatar
Defrag
Best Answer
Level 18

One of my clients uses a handful of EC2 instances with an ELB and RDS. We started off using MySQL RDS for a couple years and we migrated last year to Aurora. I'm not sure what you want to know, but honestly I have nothing but good things to say about it.

I'll be the first to admit I'm not the smartest guy in the room when it comes to database administration, so it's entirely possible that it wasn't as performance-optimized as it might otherwise have been if I'd set it up on its own EC2 instance and fine-tuned the configuration, but that's precisely why we went with RDS in the first place - less concern about screwing the pooch on the configuration/setup. We only had one issue the entire time we were using it, and that was my fault; a rogue script was logging like mad to a table and it ran out of space, causing me to have to up the size of the disk (and enable better monitoring).

It also is quite nice having nightly snapshots setup for you, along with a configurable maintenance period during which downtimes can occur. Granted, that's fairly trivial to setup for yourself, but if you're going to use a service, might as well go all the way :)

The only thing I would note is that we aren't using Forge, so this only speaks to my experience with RDS, not Forge + RDS in concert. Hope it helps anyway.

AllSystemsDown's avatar

Thank you @Defrag, this definitely helps me in making my decision. It logically makes sense to separate the application and database server...Forge just makes it easy for an all-in-one solution. In my pre-Laravel Forge days, they've always been separate.

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