Homemade cheap and cheerful clustering with MySQL+EC2?

Question

I've got a Java web service backed by MySQL + EC2 + EBS. For data integrity I've looked into DRBD, MySQL cluster etc. but wonder if there isn't a simpler solution. I don't need high availability (can handle downtime)

There are only a few operations whose data I need to preserve -- creating an account, changing password, purchase receipt. The majority of the data I can afford to recover from a stale backup.

What I am thinking is that I could pipe selected INSERT/UPDATE commands to storage (S3, SimpleDB for instance) and when required (when the db blows up) replay these commands from the point of last backup. And wouldn't it be neat if this functionality was implemented in the JDBC driver itself.

Is this too silly to work, or am I missing another obvious and robust solution?

Answer 1

Have you looked into moving your MySQL into Amazon Web Services as well? You can use Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Also see MySQL Enterprise Support.