COMPARE Between S3 Vs RDS Vs DynamoDB Vs SimpleDB

In this topic, we are going to compare between S3 vs RDS vs DynamoDB vs SimpleDB in AWS.

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S3 (Simple Storage Service)
- Is an Object Storage, you put an entire object into s3 and you can pull back out. It is not really useful for editing the object themselves.
- It’s Great for static assets
RDS (Relational Database Service)
- Hands-off RDBMS (MySQL, Orale, SqlServer)
- Manually scalable (like EC2)
DynamoDB (“column family” oriented NoSQL)
- It Deals awesome with the “3 Vs” (Verity, velocity, and volume) of big data
- It’s very Hands-off & very simple to scale
The Value Proposition to S3
- Static Storage
- It’s always the cheapest option for both store (GB/mon) & serves It is cheapest to serve than an EC2 instance
- There is no limit on the No. of objects you can create (it requires no “pre-provision” in size)
- It’s extremely durable (having 11 9’s durability). It achieves that durability by leveraging multiple nodes in multiple availability zones, so when you put files into S3 you are actually coping it many times into many availability zones.
- It’s also very scalable.
- All Objects are natively web-accessible
- It can host static websites

There are some limitations on S3 you need to be aware.

It comes with higher Latency especially when you are talking about EC2, It always going to be faster to access emperableEBS Disk then S3.
It is a write-once and read many file store – WORM (write once, read many), meaning you put an entire object in and you take it entire object out. You can’t really edit
It also cannot serve dynamic (PHP, Ruby) content
You are limit to 100 buckets and no objects larger than 5TB in size, these are Hard limits you cannot change them
It just provides read, write, list, delete and so on.

It is essential managed MySQL, Oracle, SqlServer
- MySQL is the most feature-rich including in the support read replicas
- HA is the big thing, it has Multi-AZ’s Master / Slave. If we look at how it is deployed inside the region, we have the master in one availability zone with hot standby slave in another availability zone
DR include in
- Automated backups
- Real-time snapshots
It is very Cost-Effective
- Lower cost than “roll your own” EC2 + database
- You can also bring your own license with Oracle, SqlServer
It is very Scalable
- Provides scaling with “Instance Types” like EC2 and provisioned IOPS like EBS

There are some limitations on RDS you need to be aware.

It does have an Upper limit on the vertical scale
SQL client interface
- No direct SSH or hardware control
- If you need direct control, you must use EC2 and install your own RDBMS on top of it.

Resource	Default Limit
Clusters	40
Cluster parameter groups	50
Cross-region snapshots copy requests	5
DB Instances	40
Event subscriptions	20
Manual snapshots	100
Manual cluster snapshots	100
Option groups	20
Parameter groups	50
Read replicas per master	5
Reserved instances	40
Rules per DB security group	20
Rules per VPC security group	50 inbound 50 outbound
DB Security groups	25
VPC Security groups	5
Subnet groups	50
Subnets per subnet group	20
Tags per resource	50
Total storage for all DB instances	100 TiB

Great for “Three Vs” Web-Scale:
- Variety in the types of data you are storing
- Velocity – How fast you want that data served, DynamoDB is SSD backed and it is extremely fast.
- Volume – You can store very large table inside of Dynamo
It is “Column family” key-value store
- It also very strongly consistent
Managed
HA
- Inside a region when you deploy DynamoDB you are actually deploying multiple availability zones and every time when there is a change inside the data points (inside AZ’s) it copies to all other in the cluster
DynamoDB value props (there’s more)
- Scaling
  - Tuned via (independent) read and write throughput
- Extremely cost-effective
- Very Easy to Administer
  - Automatically re-partitions data in back-end
- It Supports two lookup key types
  - Hash key (unique ID)
  - Hash + ranged key (unique ID + range – typically date)

There are some limitations on DynamoDB you need to be aware.

Static files/backups?
- S3
- Also, consider setting up CDN through CloudFront!
RDBMS interactions that need ACID compliance and/or ad-hoc query capability?
- RDS
“Three Vs” issue?
- DynamoDB

The use cases for each of the services, you can see inside of a single web app you may want to use all three together.

Eg: In a website, you may:

Store images, CSS, Javascript, HTML in s3
Store orders, customers, “ad hoc” & reporting type data in RDS
Pull “hot” tables (site likes, social interactions) out into DynamoDB
- Use a unique key like “user-id” for the primary key in Dynamo

Let’s cover something that probably you never want to do with this different storage module:

Serving static content out of anything besides s3
- Slower, more expensive, less redundant
If you try to make RDS do “web-scale” you will get a lot of problems
- Pull hot tables (at least) out into DynamoDB
If you trying to use DynamoDB for anything but “web-scale”
- You are going to find SQL (RDBMS) is better understood, more flexible
“Rolling your own” without good reason is also not a good idea
- AWS Service will be easier to use and manage
- Cheaper

Storage in AWS: What happened to SimpleDB?

Some customers decide to install their own RDBMS
- RDBMS (they really need to control)
- Some folks also decide to install their own NoSQL DB such as MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase (these are popular)
- If you need a large distributed file system.
  - Tie together many EC2/EBS Volumes via GlusterFS

This topic covers how to compare between S3 vs RDS vs DynamoDB vs SimpleDB in AWS.

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