Cloud Database Service Latency/Performance

Question

I am running a heavy traffic site and our server is beginning to get to its limits, at the moment the entire LAMP stack is on one box (not ideal).

I would like to move the database onto it's own box or onto a cloud service, but from my previous experience moving the database off the same box as the webserver increases the latency of reads quite dramatically slowing down the site.

Is using a cloud service for this going to overcome this problem, because as far as I can tell its essentially the same situation (as moving it onto a separate box in my control)? In which case why is there so much popularity around cloud based database services at the moment?

Are cloud based database services so quick that the latency of reads is so low that its almost like having it on the same box in the same datacentre?

Answer 1

Using a cloud service just for your database won't help your situation. If you only move the database, you're physically placing it in a remote location - which will always increase latencies, no matter how powerful the hardware serving the content.

I would suggest that you will see a benefit in hosting your database on a separate machines from your web server, so long as they are physically next to each other sharing a dedicated network (as already suggested).

If you wanted to explore the benefits of cloud services, I would suggest only doing so if you can move both database and web server together. Furthermore, it's really only of benefit if you explore load balancing across multiple web-servers and/or replicated databases. (The ability to scale dynamically is a major benefit of cloud based platforms).