Apptility is a big Amazon Cloud platform user. Not only we do dogfooding with it but we also recommend this platform to our clients. Cloud platform is cost efficient as it allows us to scale our compute capacity. During unpredictable business environment, cloud platform helps us to dynamically align compute resources with the business growth.

Amazon had compute scalability in Amazon EC2, storage with Amazon S3, messaging using Amazon SQS and monitoring service using Amazon CloudFront. Today they introduced Amazon RDS. Think of it as a MySQL on cloud. Customers have been asking for better SQL based data store and now they have it. This will be disruptive in many ways. Mysql administration, ongoing maintenance and patch support will all be taken care by Amazon. And that’s a big relief. MySQL server will be available in following configuration:

You can specify any one of five server instance classes:

* db.m1.small (1.7 GB of RAM, $0.11 per hour).
* db.m1.large (7.5 GB of RAM, $0.44 per hour)
* db.m1.xlarge (15 GB of RAM, $0.88 per hour).
* db.m2.2xlarge (34 GB of RAM, $1.55 per hour).
* db.m2.4xlarge (68 GB of RAM, $3.10 per hour).

This is going to be useful at many levels. Not only we can migrate our existing applications to this MySQL environment, RDS APIs will also let us invoke MySQL commands from external apps.

During beta phase, Amazon is allowing 20 databases with every AWS account. With each one going up to 1TB, you can feast on 20TB storage in this phase. Enough to satisfy majority of the web applications. Hourly charges will apply -

RDS usage is charged by the DB Instance hour. As noted above, there are five instance sizes and corresponding hourly rates. You’ll also pay 10 cents per GB per month for your provisioned storage and 10 cents for every million I/O requests

Also there are plans to replicate MySQL instances across availability zones -

* Reserved DB Instances so that you can pay a low one-time fee and then receive a substantial discount on your hourly usage charges.
* A High Availability offering so that you can easily and cost-effectively provision synchronously replicated RDS instances in two different availability zones.

Rightscale has useful insights on this announcement:

The way I think of an RDS instance is as a virtual appliance or a special-purpose server. You really get an EC2 instance with an EBS volume running a specific version of MySQL plus automation for backups and resizing the storage volume. The API is designed such that additional versions of MySQL and other databases can easily be added in the future. Just like a regular server, each RDS instance lives within an availability zone and access is controlled through a security group (plus the mysql authentication).

For more on Amazon RDS:
Documentation
Libraries
FAQs

We will start testing RDS service by migrating our CodeMunch development database to RDS. Icing on the cake is Amazon’s announcement to reduce 15% price on compute cycles. Sweet!