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0 pointsphoboslab4y ago0 comments

Fair points. I would argue that for most people a simple master-slave setup with manual failover will produce far fewer headaches than a "serverless" architecture.

When you are big enough to worry about the other issues, you surely are big enough to handle the requirements in-house. I see the dependence on some specific companies as the bigger threat to reliability.

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mjibson4y ago

The setup you describe is very much not simple. I worked at a place with very good DBAs and our replication setup caused us more downtime than anything else. Cockroach and Spanner exist because many programmers observed that what you describe is hard.

Groxx4y ago

As a counter-anecdote: multiple startup projects I've worked on with separate MySQL setups where each had just a single master + two slaves (one warm for fast failover in case of hardware failure or upgrades, one cold for slow analytics-style queries) did just fine with millions (to tens of millions) of users. No downtime at all for years on end.

MySQL and Postgres are massively more widely-used than Cockroach and Spanner, broadly very successfully. It's entirely feasible to run it with high uptime.

dboreham4y ago

Very few deployments experience actual failures. Could be some fridge-door/light situation going on.

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