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."

Comments

Optimization

[dingen]

I wonder if programming for cloud services will bring back the need for code that is optimized for speed (or using as little resources as possible), since you pay for the actual usage of these resources.

Re:A Little Disappointed

[jcnnghm]

Very true. Hourly billing and the ability to quickly provision systems is what makes these services. For our newest application, we only purchased enough equipment to handle the application base load. Our application then monitors the acceleration of system response times, load, and requests to automatically provision cloud servers. Essentially, we'll transfer messaging servers to the cloud, then internally re-provision to handle the new application loads, depending on what the actual load looks like. When the load falls, we'll transition back.

The benefit of cloud computing is that for a few dollars a month, we can provision a few extra servers for the relatively few hours of peak load. This allows us to reduce our upfront cash outlay, while also allowing us to maximize our server usage.