Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright team, huddle up. The marketing department just forwarded me another blog post full of sunshine and promises, this time about Aurora Global Database. As the guy whose pager is surgically attached to my hip, let me translate this masterpiece for you from my collection of vendor stickers for databases that no longer exist.
First, they hit us with the big one: "minimal downtime." This is my favorite corporate euphemism. It's the same "minimal downtime" we were promised during that last "seamless" patch, which somehow took down our entire authentication service for 45 minutes because nobody told the application connection pool about the "seamless" DNS flip. Our definitions of "minimal" seem to differ. To them, it's a few dropped packets. To me, it's the exact length of time it takes for a P1 ticket to hit my boss's inbox.
They claim you can create this mirror environment with "just a few steps." Sure. In the same way that landing on the moon is "just a few steps" after you've already built the rocket. They always forget the pre-steps: the three weeks of IAM policy debugging, the network ACLs that mysteriously block replication traffic, and discovering the one critical service that was hard-coded to the blue environment's endpoint by an intern three years ago.
I love the confidence in this "fully managed staging (green) environment mirroring the existing production." A mirror, huh? More like one of those funhouse mirrors. It looks the same until you get close and realize everything is slightly warped. I'm already picturing the switchover on Memorial Day weekend. We'll flip the switch, and for five glorious seconds, everything will look perfect. Then we'll discover that a sub-millisecond replication lag was just enough to lose a batch of 10,000 transactions, and I'll get to explain the concept of "eventual consistency" to the finance department.
…including the primary and its associated secondary regions of the Global Database.
Oh, this is my favorite part. It’s not just one magic button anymore. It’s a series of magic buttons that have to be pressed in perfect, cross-continental harmony. What could possibly go wrong orchestrating a state change across three continents at 3 AM? I'm sure the failover logic is flawless when the primary in Virginia succeeds but the secondary in Ireland hangs, leaving our global database in a state of quantum superposition. It’s both live and dead until someone opens the box. That someone will be me.
And of course, not a single word about how we're supposed to monitor this beautiful, transient green environment. Are my existing alarms just supposed to magically discover this new, parallel universe? I can guarantee our dashboards will show a sea of green for the blue environment, right up until the moment we switch over and the real production environment—the one with no monitoring configured—promptly catches fire. The first alert we’ll get is from Twitter. It always is.
Go ahead, print out the announcement. It’ll look great on the server rack, right next to my sticker for RethinkDB.