ruben81adelaide

The things started to go from bad to worse when work_mem parameter has not been set up correctly.

Some queries that requires a large amount of memory to process started to use disk.

Once the autoscaling kicked in, even if we would have realized about it, wouldn't have helped as you are locked out of the system.

The auto-scaling event was triggered earlier than our alerts for low disk available.

What I don't know yet, is that we have been moving services for multiple days, and the service that required the work_mem parameter was in production in that AWS for 48 hours before started to use disk rather than memory to process the SQL Queries.

@fxtentacle

I agree with you. This actually makes a lot of sense. Probably the title reflected the anger and frustration that I was feeling after the poor support.

Actually the company that is being migrated to AWS is quite large, but not large enough to get in spending $1+mio annually. This migration was one system from many others that needs to be moved.

But, still, 10+ years ago the support in AWS was available for free to everybody, you would get in contact with a big nerd that knew the ins and outs of the system and would help you massively on pretty much anything.

Slowly, they allow just paid support, and now not even paying listen to your problems.

At the very beginning, it was the small(-ish) companies (which a few exceptions) which gave name to AWS, and an army of geeks talking all positive about the services.

If now they just work with large corporations, it is a big (and risky) change, which goes against the Amazon Leadership Principle "Customer Obsession".

@evil-olive

Thanks for your feedback. Aurora is something that we would definitely look in the future, but with the levels of workload that we are currently experiencing postgres RDS should work for quite a long time.

> CockroachDB or Cassandra or something similar.

I can't wait for a business use case where I need something like this :) but unfortunately right now this is not the case.

> Does Cloudwatch confirm that RDS "needed" to scale?

Actually you pointed out to a clue that I missed. I should have checked cloud watch!

The free space graphs shows that at some point something got the 200 GB of space that we originally assigned.

This is a good clue that I am going to dig in.

Thanks for your feedback!

EDIT: Cloudwatch metrics in RDS has been the key to find the source of the issue.

@synicalx thanks for your feedback.

I will see if there is anything visible in Cloud Watch.

> - Other than the (presumably) one change made to that RDS instance at ~4.30AM, were there any other changes made to it, specifically to its storage, prior to the autoscaling event?

At 4.30 the following has been logged: "Storage size 999 GB is approaching the maximum storage threshold 1000 GB. Increase the maximum storage threshold."

However the auto scaling event started at 10.17.

> - Had this service been tested on RDS prior to the migration being performed?

We have performed a dozen migration simulations in our Sandbox Account in multiple weeks. We developed scripts and automation to make the actual migration. The only difference in the Sandbox Account is that the RDS database was smaller in CPU and RAM.

> - Were any other changes made, that may potentially effect your DB? For example a query being changed or something of that nature.

I will double check with the team, but all the migration was fully automated with scripts. I have not been reported any action required outside executing the automation scripts and performing the plan.

@tus666 thanks for the tip. "Collapsing Under it's Own Weight" is more accurate.

There are 3 types of programming languages you can learn: Modular programming, Object oriented, and Functional programming

Python- it has a very simple syntax and it’s easy to learn. It can be used for modular programming and object oriented and it is forgiving if you don’t strictly follow the best practices. Therefore it can help to make thing working while you’re learning

From my working experience in Spain, "error" is a more generic term. The word "bug" is commonly used to specify an error in the software.

You would expect that a company as big as they are to update their status page as well...Anyhow, at least they communicate via twitter.

Yes, they are down again. They had some downtime a few weeks back as well in the NYC3 region.

Yes, I monitor about 1000 servers in Digital Ocean in New York, London and Singapore. Only New York went down for about 1 hour and a couple of hours later the global DNS system in DO went down as well for about 15 min. They initially didn't made any update in their Status page

They don’t mention other benefits rather than just the pay package. And nowadays, not allowing remote work.