A New Trend: Organizations Moving Away from Managed MySQL

The Road Back Home

The cloud revolution promised scalability, flexibility, and cost savings. For many organizations, Amazon Aurora and other cloud-based MySQL database services delivered on that promise, offering managed MySQL-compatible database SaaS with good performance and availability. Yet, a surprising trend is emerging: a growing number of organizations are choosing to migrate their data back from Aurora to on-premises MySQL deployments. This shift challenges the prevailing narrative of cloud dominance, raising a crucial question: why are companies repatriating their databases?

Hidden Costs and Unexpected Hurdles

Let’s get into some of the biggest challenges with Managed MySQL

Unexpected and Unpredictable Costs

While cloud providers promised cheap and predictable costs, the reality is quite the opposite. There are a number of factors that impact cost, such as data movement out of database service, demand spikes, change in usage patterns, and scaling. These costs are easily overlooked in adopting a managed database service.

As an example, an organization migrates their 1TB MySQL database to Aurora and decides on a db.r3.4xlarge Aurora instance. They also choose to provision 3 instances for high availability and read scaling. This alone is $5,704/month, or $68,448/year. This is quite easy to calculate upfront. However, they did not account for their I/O usage: 1000 IOPS, with a peak usage of 1500 IOPS for an 8-hour period, which is another $500/month or $6000/year. How about retaining backups for compliance, such as 10TB in snapshot storage and 20TB storage for S3? And performance insights for a year? That is an additional $500/month, or $6000/year. Adding additional support beyond 24-hour email response: $675/month or $8,100/year. New total? $88,544/year, which is about $20,000 more than anticipated.

Of course, they would also like to create dev and staging environments, driving up costs further. Significant cost savings can be realized by prepaying for “reserved” instances, but these cost savings are only realized if the reserved instances are chosen correctly and are able to be applied. Reserved instances are usually a year commitment, and inaccurate planning can be quite expensive. These hidden costs can significantly impact the overall return on investment of a managed MySQL solution.

Vendor Lock-in

While it is easy to get started with a managed MySQL database service, it’s quite difficult to migrate out, and there could be a substantial cost involved due to egress data charges. Deploying into managed MySQL means an organization is dependent on a single cloud provider, which dictates costs, security, and features.

Unexpected Outages

Any cloud provider will have unplanned outages. Systems fail or get misconfigured. When this happens, organizations simply must wait for the cloud provider to address the outage. Also, managed MySQL services have maintenance windows for updates, which cannot be avoided. Consider this recent announcement from Azure:

“Azure Database for MariaDB will be retired on 19 September 2025… On 19 September 2025, workloads running Azure Database for MariaDB will be deleted and associated application data will be lost.”

Essentially, organizations have one year to migrate to another database or service. This is an unexpectedly large undertaking, especially for organizations with many MariaDB instances in Azure. It is also a large project that brings no value to the organization.

No direct access to database server and data

Using managed MySQL means losing direct access to the MySQL database. Direct database access, however, is beneficial for performance tuning and administrative tasks. For instance, to change a database tuning parameter in Aurora, you must first create a database parameter group, then add the change to the parameter group, and then assign the parameter group to the Aurora instance or cluster. You have a choice to apply immediately, or apply during the next maintenance window, but in either case, the database or cluster must be restarted, resulting in downtime, potentially several minutes, even for seemingly minor changes. This is where managed MySQL is actually much more difficult to maintain than standard MySQL.

Security and compliance challenges

With data being managed by the cloud provider, the cloud provider also has responsibility for security. Organizations must consider if the cloud provider is delivering the right security and compliance for their data. Also, as data sovereignty and localization requirements change, and by using managed MySQL, organizations could be unknowingly violating local laws.

Tungsten Clusters: Regain Control and Optimize Your MySQL Deployments

Continuent has been providing MySQL high availability, clustering, scalability, and geo-deployed topologies for over 20 years. With the flexibility of Tungsten Clustering, we are uniquely positioned to address the hurdles and unexpected costs that organizations are facing with their MySQL deployments.

Predictable Costs

Tungsten Clusters run on any instance type, such as: Standard Cloud instances, VM’s, and on bare metal hardware. Admins can right-size their infrastructure and avoid spending on unnecessary resources. You can even choose a blend of instance types. Costs are much easier to predict when running on known hardware, and Tungsten Clusters can easily be moved to other instance types. Deployed in AWS EC2, but a cost analysis reveals that Azure instances will offer significant savings? Simply move the Tungsten Cluster – we make this process easy.

No Vendor Lock-in

You have full access to your database. As mentioned above, using Tungsten Clusters, a cluster (which includes your full MySQL database), can be moved from one cloud provider to another. It can be moved from the cloud to on site. Because everything is under your control, you can run your workloads based on business requirements and costs. All of the tools needed to migrate and manage the cluster are included. Also, you have the freedom to choose your MySQL distribution and version. An organization using MariaDB may want to migrate to Percona Server. Tungsten Cluster helps you do the migration without downtime.

No Unexpected Outages

Tungsten Cluster provides rock-solid high availability AND zero-downtime maintenance. This is critical for workloads that require 24/7 uptime. With your data under your control, you decide when to do maintenance instead of your cloud provider. Using Tungsten Clustering, you can perform maintenance without any application downtime. A failure of a MySQL database (or host) running on a Tungsten Cluster will automatically failover without interruption.

Complete Access to Database Server and Data

When deploying Tungsten Clusters for MySQL, the organization has complete control over the MySQL database servers and databases. This provides the flexibility to use any version of MySQL, MariaDB, or Percona Server. Making configuration changes to the database server or to MySQL is easy and familiar since the organization chooses the architecture and hardware that works best. With our zero-downtime maintenance, performing changes is easy, using familiar tools. Other advantages include choosing backup tools and strategies that best fit your organization and retention requirements, provisioning of dev and QA clusters, and no restrictions on parameters can be changed.

Maintain Security and Compliance

Tungsten Clusters put the MySQL infrastructure under the organization’s control. Organizations can implement security policies based on their security requirements, and have the ability to easily modify policies. Data localization is easy with Tungsten Clusters, since the organization has full control of where to deploy its Clusters. Clusters can easily be moved, and can span regions and continents. Even database writes can be localized in relation to the users, or be localized to a single region.

Real Support and Expert Guidance

Organizations deploying Tungsten Clusters also have technical support at their disposal. Continuent does not have “tiered” support; all customers get access to engineers with at least 20 years of database and system experience. Continuent’s engineers can also assist with architecture design and planning. Managed MySQL providers simply cannot provide this level of support, and any level beyond email support is an additional (significant) cost.

Organizations are increasingly realizing that managed MySQL services may not always deliver on their initial promises of simplicity, cost savings, and flexibility. From unexpected costs and vendor lock-in to limited control and potential outages, the challenges can be significant. Tungsten Clusters empower organizations to regain control over their MySQL deployments, optimize costs, ensure high availability, and maintain compliance. By providing flexibility, comprehensive support, and advanced features, Tungsten Clusters enable businesses to leverage the power of MySQL on their own terms, ensuring their database infrastructure aligns seamlessly with their evolving needs and strategic objectives.