Amazon launched MySQL as a Service

Same as last year, right before the Microsoft developer conference PDC (where the company announces the new platform features), Amazon begins to act in order to capture developers' attention. Last year Microsoft showed Windows Azure, and Amazon at the same time unveiled unveiled Windows based EC2 instances. This year Microsoft is going to present the new cloud relational database Azure SQL, and here is Amazon's answer - Amazon RDS (Relational Database as a Service), the new service that provides ready-to-deploy scalable relational database MySQL.

Amazon RDS allows easily install and use MySQL instances using the common MySQL utilities. Besides, Amazon will take care about MySQL updates and database scheduled backups. You can also scale the database resources with the help of easy-to-use API.

Of course, until now Amazon developers also could deploy MySQL in their applications using Amazon EC2 and EBS services. But it was quite complicated task that required a lot of time and knowledge. Besides, developers had an option to use FathomDB - the add-on service that provided ready-to-use MySQL instances, working on top of EC2 instances. Probably Amazon is killing this service with the new announcement.

 

As usual for AWS, you pay only for Amazon RDS resources that you actually use. Of course, we can't say that the new service is very affordable. You pay about $80per month for the smallest DB Instance + $0.10 per GB-month + $0.10 per million requests. But remember that you pay for reliability, scalability and simplicity.

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