Thanks to everyone who attended last week’s webinar, Running MySQL 5.6 on Amazon RDS.” If you weren’t able to attend, the recording and slides are available for viewing/download (or, if you were able to attend and just want to see it again). I’ve also answered the questions I didn’t have a chance to field during the event:
Q: Would you recommend Amazon RDS over manually setting up MySQL/Percona server on an EC2 instance?
A: This depends on many factors including your data set size, workload, uptime requirements, what the rest of your stack looks like, and many other factors.
Q: At Q&A time, can you go more into 5.6 InnoDB full text search vs the Amazon search offering? Was that CloudSearch you meant? Are they comparable functionality?
A: I’ll blog in more detail about Amazon’s CloudSearch in the near future.
Q: Provisioned IOPS cost – ballpark figures?
A: The official RDS Overview page has detailed answers, but somewhere (depending on the Region) around $0.10 per IOPS-Month ($0.20 for multi-AZ deployments) , in addition to the $0.125 per GB-month storage fee ($0.25 for multi-AZ).
Q: I want to have a minimal outage migration to custom applications using Amazon RDS mysql 5.5 to mysql 5.6. In non-RDS I make a Mysql 5.6 replica os the mysql 5.5 and that have a quick switch to the mysql 5.6 replica. What can I do in RDS?
A: Nothing. Yet. Quote from the AWS blog:
“Upgrading an existing database instance from MySQL 5.5 to MySQL 5.6 is not currently supported. However, we intend to provide this functionality in the near future.
In the meantime, if you would like to port your existing MySQL 5.5 database to MySQL 5.6, you can use mysqldump to export your database from your existing MySQL 5.5 database instance and import it into a new MySQL 5.6 database instance.”
Q: We finally got to meet the background baby on this slide 
Awesome! Goes down as my favorite already!
A: Apologies for the baby in the background. It should be noted that those were screams of JOY as she played with Elmo.
Q: Can IOPS be easily increased as well (similar to storage)?
A: Yes. Simply click “Instance Actions” and then “Modify” and the option to increase provisioned IOPS is there.
Q: How do you shutdown a rds i see nothing in the console?
A: Simply click “Instance Actions” and then “Delete”. This will walk you through the process of deleting an RDS instance
Q: Is it possible to shutdown RDS instances when you don’t need them ? impact on pricing ?
A: Yes, it is possible (see previous answer). For on-demand instances, you only pay for the hours you use, so once they are deleted, you won’t pay for them any more (reserved instances are another story, which I covered in the webinar).
Q: Have any clue of how Amazon RDS backups mysql instances? is it with LVM snapshots, a tool like xtrabackup?
A: My *guess* would be basically the equivalent of EBS snapshots, but that’s only a guess. Anybody from Amazon want to comment?
Q: Amazon RDS Standby is different than a Read Replica, correct? Do we have access to the RDS Standby like we do with a Read Replica?
A: Correct. A read replica is different from the multi-AZ standby. There is no access to the RDS standby (except in the event of a failover, when it becomes the primary).
Q: What is the best way to migrate existing data (on MySQL instance in EC2) into Amazon RDS?
A: mysqldump. There are other, more complicated, ways. But mysqldump is the easiest and most proven.
Q: I need to set outgoing firewall rules to the multi-AZ RDS server. Since I only get a CNAME from RDS, do I have to set my outgoing firewall to the entire internet on port 3306?
A: I’m not sure that I follow. Access to the instance should be controlled via RDS Security Groups (or VPC setup).
Thanks again for attending and submitting your questions; Amazon is making constant improvements in RDS, making it a more-and-more compelling option to a number of organizations.
The post Running MySQL 5.6 on Amazon RDS: Webinar followup questions answered appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.