RDS has been working out pretty well for AdGrok — it’s a one-click MySQL 5.1 instance that seems pretty promising:
- Automatic replication and failover to another deployment zone (colo)
- Easy to set up firewall configuration
- Easy to scale up (but not down) for CPU and disk space
If you’re just starting out, it’s a whole lot simpler than, say, a DRBD/Heartbeat/MySQL configuration running on EC2 instances.
There’s just one catch. It doesn’t use UTF-8 encoding by default, it uses latin1_swedish. If you’re going to do business outside the US, utf8 is a must.
The second catch — the Amazon web UI for managing RDS “parameter groups” is read-only. If you know the magick incantations, though, it’s not that bad. Here’s how to make it all go: