Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a new Web service that makes it easy to set up, operate and scale relational databases in the cloud. The database is based on the MySQL platform, the company said.Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the Amazon Relational
Database Service (Amazon RDS), a new Web service that makes it easy to
set up, operate and scale relational databases in the cloud.
Amazon RDS provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while
automating time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing users
to focus on their application and their business. The database is based
on the MySQL platform, the company said.
Moreover, AWS officials noted that as with all Amazon Web Services,
there are no up-front investments required, and users pay only for the
resources they use.
Also announced on Oct. 27, AWS has lowered prices and introduced a
new family of High-Memory instances for Amazon EC2. To get
started using Amazon RDS, and other Amazon Web Services, visit
http://aws.amazon.com.
For almost two years, many AWS customers have taken advantage of
the simplicity, reliability and seamless scalability that Amazon
SimpleDB provides; however, many customers have told us that their
applications require a relational database. Thats why we built Amazon
RDS, which combines a familiar relational database with automated
management and the instant scalability of the AWS cloud, said Adam
Selipsky, vice president of Amazon Web Services, in a statement.
Amazon RDS provides a basic MySQL database, so existing code and
applications developers have in use today with their existing MySQL
databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. The service automatically
handles common database administration tasks such as setup and
provisioning, patch management and backup - storing the backups for a
user-defined retention period, the company said.
Meanwhile, customers also have the flexibility to scale the compute
and storage resources associated with their database instance through a
simple API call, AWS officials said, noting that Amazon RDS is easy to
deploy and simple to manage.
I found Amazon RDS to be a very efficient way to deploy MySQL, and
a natural fit for cloud-based application deployment, said David
Tompkins, a senior computer scientist at Adobe Systems Advanced
Technology Labs. The instance is up and running in minutes, and very
sensible defaults are baked in. The APIs provide streamlined
administration, with an ability to programmatically automate
administration functions which is a key feature in cloud-based
applications. Most importantly, Amazon RDS provides pain-free
scalability - which is typically one of the most time-consuming and
expensive aspects of database deployment.
"We started using Amazon RDS to store metadata for each and every
publisher, advertiser and creative we serve through the system, said
Michael Lugassy, founder and CEO of Kehalim, an advertising
optimization and monetization platform, in a statement. After noticing
a big performance improvement, we decided to use Amazon RDS to track
all of our impression, clicks and earning data as well. Results were
amazing and freed us from the need to run our own MySQL instances.
Amazon RDS allows us to focus on front-end features, rather than
back-end database complexity."
Our customers have been clamoring for a MySQL option as part of the
Heroku platform, so we were thrilled to learn about Amazon RDS, said
Morten Bagai, director of business development at Heroku, a Ruby
Platform-as-a-Service provider, in a statement. Amazon Web
Services has made it painless to provision and manage a MySQL database.
Based on our testing, we expect Amazon RDS to be a very popular
database option for our customers.
Separately, AWS is also lowering prices on all Amazon EC2 On-Demand
compute instances, effective on Nov. 1. Charges for Linux-based
instances will drop 15 percent -- a small Linux instance will now cost
just 8.5 cents per hour, compared to the previous price of 10 cents per
hour.
In addition, AWS also is introducing a new family of High-Memory
Instances for Amazon EC2. This further expands the available selection
of computing configurations for Amazon EC2, helping customers to choose
the CPU capacity, memory resources, and networking throughput that
their applications require. High-Memory Instances are designed to
be used with memory-intensive workloads such as databases, caching and
rendering, and are optimized for low-latency, high-throughput
performance, AWS officials said.