Alibaba Cloud will stop the updates and maintenance for the shared proxy service of ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL starting from April 1, 2021. Since then, Alibaba Cloud will provide only technical support for 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 in your database system based on the read weights of these instances. This allows you to implement read/write splitting and to reduce the loads on the primary RDS instance. For more information, see Dedicated proxy. 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 RDS instances on which shared proxies are enabled. These instances run MySQL 5.7 on RDS High-availability Edition with local SSDs or run MySQL 5.6.

You can go to the Database Proxy page of a primary RDS instance and check whether the Read/Write Splitting (Shared) tab exists. If the tab exists, the instance is using shared proxies.

Reasons

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

Impacts

  • Alibaba Cloud will update and maintain dedicated proxies. However, no update or maintenance will be provided for shared proxies.
  • No service level agreement (SLA) guarantee will be provided for the stability of shared proxies.

Suggestions

We recommend that you perform the upgrade 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 perform the upgrade for a primary RDS instance before April 1, 2021, an discount is offered. This discount exempts you from paying for the dedicated proxies within the lifecycle of the instance. For more information about the fees required, see Fees 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 the upgrade, 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 advantages of dedicated proxies over shared proxies.

Category Shared proxy Dedicated proxy
Queries per second (QPS) The QPS cannot be guaranteed and can increase to 1000 at most. In addition, 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 more dedicated proxies. A maximum of 60 dedicated proxies are allowed for each RDS instance.
Stability A number of RDS instances that belong to different users compete for resources. Each RDS instance has its own dedicated proxies and does not need to compete for resources with other RDS instances.
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 service availability.
Monitoring Monitoring is not supported. You can monitor the CPU utilization of dedicated proxies to identify proxy resource bottlenecks.
Read/write splitting Read/write splitting is supported. Read/write splitting 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 need to 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 Connection pool.
  • 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 Transaction splitting.
  • SSL encryption: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption is used to encrypt the data destined for the dedicated proxy endpoint. This ensures the security of data in transit. For more information, see Configure SSL encryption for a dedicated proxy endpoint.