Amazon Relational Database Service

Amazon have just announced a new addition to their web services family - Relational Database Service (RDS).

This is "a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud" - it would appear to be a MySQL 5.1 database configured on an optimised EC2 instance, with full patching and backup provision all in place, and all the benefits of integration with other AWS services in terms of performance and cost.

We have been using AWS extensively for hosting Drupal and other web applications, and of course a reliable MySQL database is a key requirment - we have been using a variant of the technique described by Eric Hammond where the MySQL data is maintained in Elastic Block Store (EBS) attached to the instance, with regular snapsohts. This would seem to make all that hard work redundant if you can justify the cost of a dedicated db instance.

In the same newsletter, Amazon announced a 15% reduction in pricing of Linux based EC2 instances, and also two new High-Memory instances. This all combined makes vertcial scaling an easy approach if your application needs more bang, but we're still hoping to fully address the technical challenges we're facing devloping a good, solid method for horizontally scaling apps such as Drupal using AWS.