Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Cloud Adds Hosted MySQL
1sockchuck writes "Amazon Web Services has added a relational database service to host MySQL databases in the cloud, and is also dropping prices on its Amazon EC2 compute service by as much as 15 percent. Amazon says the new service lets users focus on development rather than maintenance, but it will probably be bad news for startups offering database services built atop Amazon's cloud. Cloud Avenue warns that Amazon RDS should serve as 'a warning bell for the companies that build their entire business on Amazon ecosystem. ... They are just one announcement away from complete destruction.' Data Center Knowledge has a roundup of analysis and commentary on Amazon RDS and its impact on the cloud ecosystem."
While not directly comparable, the Azure platform being launched next month by Microsoft includes two relational database options:
1. Small database (1GB)- $9.99/month
2. Large database (10GB) - $99.99/month
Each SQL Azure database is triple redundant automatically, and you do not pay for storage or load balancing. The Amazon model has you paying for the instance ($81 per 31 days for the small instance) plus storage charges and other costs.
Not too impressed at the moment.
No, you don't.
You pay on run-time, not CPU time consumed, so pay 0.11*24*31 for a month, regardless of usage.
Unless ofcourse you have a script that fires up an instance on the moment your website is accessed, and shuts it down afterward, but that might be sub-optimal in responsetime :)
It's $0.00 (per GB) if it's within the same availability zone, and $0.01 (per GB) between zones. If you're using AWS for the database, you should probably be using it for the php/server too, and you can control the zone your instances are launched in, so you can get the $0.00.
Not sure if the rest is accurate, but I (hopefully) just cut your bill in half.
What you don't mention is that you pay a premium for using only what you need instead of building out your own infrastructure. In some cases, the premium is upwards of 100% (have had to run the numbers for several clients, for some it works out well, for some it's grossly more expensive).
I think that's fair. It would be pretty amazing if it worked out cheaper in all cases, and everyone should run the numbers and evaluate the benefits before going into it.
I know Smugmug.com believe they're $500K by using S3 instead of their own storage servers. http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/11/10/amazon-s3-show-me-the-money/
But, there are plenty of scenarios where due to predictable loads (or simply low loads), or simple requirements Amazon's pricing model is a bad fit.
I would be most tempted by Amazon's model if I was starting up a service, was hoping for huge sudden growth, but didn't have the confidence to invest upfront in my own hardware for that capacity.
I guess if a company is counting hardware costs, payroll, electricity, and stuff like that.. $80 might be a good deal. But i think most people would rather have a normal server hosted for $10-20 a month.
"Might be a good deal"? Are you kidding? It's a raging deal! You get patching, sysadmin, hosting, etc for that $80. You likely even get more in terms of resources than you would on your "normal" $20/month hosted server (which is probably going to be some pokey virtualized instance on a grossly overloaded server some place).
You also get backups and redundancy for that eighty bucks. The PSU blows in that hosted server and you're looking at downtime. You lose a disk and then you're looking at paying one of your employees to re-install everything, reload the DB, test it, etc.
You can do a hell of a lot with what they're giving you. I wouldn't use it for a personal web site or anything, but for a small business who needs a basic DB-backed web site/service, it's quite a deal (especially if they are short on internal IT resources). Given MySQL's popularity in its nice, I'd say the DB choice was appropriate as well.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.