I'm doing it right now. Nine months into a sabbatical during which I've been working on music and enjoying the fact that my phone isn't going to wake me up in the middle of the night because the database is broken. I don't expect to go back to work (I don't need the money, but it's possible I might miss the social aspects of having a normal day job), but I'm not particularly concerned should I change my mind. My primary skillset is specialized enough that there aren't that many people who do what I do.

Not really. The migration of hundreds of terabytes of data from one storage solution to another is never a no-brainer, and it's not just because of technical concerns. RDS is a very good solution for a lot of people, but it's not the right fit for everyone.

OP spent multiple months playing around with the kernel and mysql parameters to solve the issue. What happens when they have to do the same thing for the next version of the kernel, or patches like Meltdown? RDS has entire massive teams dedicated to solving exactly this problem for OP's exact use-case.

Hi. I'm the author of that presentation, and I just got a text message from a friend saying that I'm on the front page of Hacker News...

The one thing in that talk that I was never 100% sure of was whether it was block-mq that provided the performance improvement. It wasn't until about a year later that I came across some articles which confirmed that that it was actually due to the development of, and subsequent fixes to, the Xen persistent-grants feature.

In other words, ignore slides 15 and 16. =/

Do you have updates on how the performance is on 4.x kernel versions?

Yes and no. I have all sorts of test results for the 4.x kernel, but they are for i3 instances rather than i2.*, so they wouldn't be directly comparable. Your question kind of makes me think I should put together an updated version of this talk; I've gathered enough material over the last couple of years that would probably be useful to somebody.

Yes, that would be useful. 4.x kernels has some block io improvements and some recent phoronix benchmark shows ext4 making huge strides.

This was my first thought, kernel 3.x is more than a little dated now and there is a huge amount of IO performance and latency related changes that have been incorporated since the 3.x days.