Using RDS and Digital Ocean Droplets together

Question

Is it a great idea to use AWS RDS and Digital Ocean together?

AWS RDS for storage and Digital Ocean droplets for computing in the same country.

I'm asking because I've a reserved AWS RDS machine, however, do not feel like paying more to AWS for EC2 since Digital Ocean droplet is a lot cheaper.

However, I supposed it will introduce delay and I'll need to pay for outgoing network data.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I just did a small measurement of ping times between DigitalOcean, EC2 and for reference Hetzner (datacenter located a few hundred kilometers from Frankfurt).

• In the same region of the same provider:
  • Hetzner to another Hetzner server: ~ 0.3ms
  • DigitalOcean Frankfurt to DigitalOcean Frankfurt: ~0.45ms
  • EC2 Frankfurt to EC2 Frankfurt: ~0.45ms
• Between providers:
  • Hetzner to EC2 Frankfurt: ~6ms
  • Hetzner to DigitalOcean Frankfurt: ~5ms
  • DigitalOcean Frankfurt to EC2 Frankfurt: ~1.2ms

So the latency is pretty good, if you are using the same region (at least in the case of Frankfurt). If this additional latency is acceptable for you depends on your requirements. On another note: Mixing clouds can add to the complexity of the deployment and also makes it more difficult to fully use some of the cloud specific features.