[Notice] End of updates and maintenance for the shared proxy service - Important Notice| Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

On April 1, 2021, Alibaba Cloud will stop the updates and maintenance for the shared proxy service of ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL. After this date, Alibaba Cloud will provide only technical support for the shared proxy service. If you no longer use the shared proxy service (namely, you no longer use the read/write splitting feature), you can disable the shared proxy service. If you still use the shared proxy service, we recommend that you upgrade your primary RDS instance from shared proxy to dedicated proxy at your earliest opportunity.

Database proxies reside between your database system and your application. All the requests from your application are sent to the database proxies. Then, the database proxies route the requests to the primary and read-only RDS instances of your database system based on the read weights of these instances. This is used to implement read/write splitting and reduce the loads on the primary RDS instance. For more information, see What are dedicated proxies? ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL provides two types of database proxies: dedicated proxies and shared proxies. In contrast with shared proxies, dedicated proxies are easy to use and maintain, and provide high availability and high performance. In addition, dedicated proxies support advanced features, such as transaction splitting and connection pool.

Effective date

April 1, 2021

Affected instances

This notice applies to all primary RDS instances on which shared proxies are enabled. These instances run MySQL 5.6 or run MySQL 5.7 on RDS High-availability Edition with local SSDs.

You can go to the Database Proxy page of your primary RDS instance and check for the Read/Write Splitting (Shared) tab. If the tab is available, shared proxies are enabled on the instance.

Reasons

A shared proxy serves more than one primary RDS instance, and these instances may belong to different users. This decreases the stability of your database service due to potential resource competition and isolation issues. Therefore, we recommend that you upgrade your primary RDS instance from shared proxy to dedicated proxy. Dedicated proxies outperform shared proxies. For more information about the benefits of dedicated proxies, see the "Benefits" section of this topic.

Impacts

Alibaba Cloud provides updates and maintenance for dedicated proxies. However, Alibaba Cloud will no longer provide updates and maintenance for shared proxies.
The stability of shared proxies will not be guaranteed in the service level agreement (SLA).

Suggestions

We recommend that you upgrade your primary RDS instance from shared proxy to dedicated proxy before April 1, 2021. For more information, see Upgrade an ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL instance from shared proxy to dedicated proxy.

Fees

Dedicated proxies are charged. If you upgrade your primary RDS instance from shared proxy to dedicated proxy before April 1, 2021, a discount is available. This discount specifies that you do not need to pay for the dedicated proxies within the lifecycle of the instance. For more information about the required fees, see Billing for dedicated proxies. For more information about the discount, see Upgrade an ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL instance from shared proxy to dedicated proxy.

Note If you renew your primary RDS instance after you upgrade the instance from shared proxy to dedicated proxy, the lifecycle of the instance is extended. However, the discount is still applied based on the expiration date at the time of the upgrade.

Benefits

The following table describes the benefits of dedicated proxies over shared proxies.


Category	Shared proxy	Dedicated proxy
Queries per second (QPS)	The QPS cannot be guaranteed. The maximum QPS is 1,000. You cannot increase the QPS by scaling out resources.	The QPS is stable. Each dedicated proxy supports up to 20,000 QPS. In addition, you can increase the QPS by adding dedicated proxies. A maximum of 60 dedicated proxies can be enabled for each primary RDS instance.
Stability	A number of primary RDS instances that belong to different users compete for resources.	Each primary RDS instance has its own dedicated proxies and does not need to compete with other primary RDS instances for resources.
Availability	Each shared proxy works in the single-node architecture. If a shared proxy becomes faulty, it is disconnected.	Each dedicated proxy works in the high-availability architecture. This ensures the availability of your database service.
Monitoring	Monitoring is not supported.	You can monitor the CPU utilization of dedicated proxies to identify proxy resource bottlenecks.
Read/write splitting	The read/write splitting feature is supported.	The read/write splitting feature is supported.
Read/write splitting endpoint	The read/write splitting endpoint is supported. After the read/write splitting feature is disabled, the read/write splitting endpoint is immediately released. In this case, you must modify the endpoint configuration on your application.	The read/write splitting endpoint is supported. To implement read/write splitting by using a dedicated proxy endpoint, you need only to add the dedicated proxy endpoint to your application. If you enable or disable the read/write splitting feature, you do not need to modify the endpoint configuration on your application. The dedicated proxy endpoint remains valid unless you disable the dedicated proxy service.
Advanced features	None.	The following advanced features are provided: Connection pool: If an abnormally large number of connections are established or short-lived connections over PHP are frequently established, you can use this feature to mitigate the heavy loads on your primary RDS instance. For more information, see Set the connection pool type of an ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL instance. Transaction splitting: This feature allows ApsaraDB RDS to route the read requests prior to write operations within a transaction to the read-only RDS instances. This reduces the loads on your primary RDS instance. For more information, see Enable the transaction splitting feature for an ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL instance. SSL encryption: This feature allows ApsaraDB RDS to encrypt the data that is destined for the dedicated proxy endpoint. This ensures the security of the data in transit. For more information, see Configure SSL encryption for a dedicated proxy endpoint on an ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL instance.