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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."
I guess the warning bell is, if your business model is to host something simple and obvious on EC2, then resell it, you can expect direct competition - in this case from Amazon themselves.
To be sustainable, you need to add something difficult, or non-obvious, or that fills a niche, or stands out in some other way.
Cloud Avenue could still do OK, if they can make their offering better than Amazon's, by whatever means - a nicer UI, better management tools, better customer support, etc.
I'm getting increasingly fed up of every cloud story getting piles of comments deriding cloud as "just" something else.
- "The Cloud is just another name for datacenter"
- "The Cloud is just another name for distributed computing"
- "The Cloud is just another name for thin-client computing"
- etc.
In this particular case, yes, the backend of the Amazon cloud is a bunch of datacentres.
And you could build a virtual datacentre in the Amazon cloud.
But that doesn't mean that every datacentre is a cloud, because a cloud has properties that most datacentres do not.
In the context you speak of, the new thing is the billing.
(The ability to use automated systems to quickly add and remove virtual machines is also an advancement from traditional virtual hosting)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
well i am not IT pro or something, but what exactly is "new" on this cloud?
The fact that you pay only for what you actually use and the services scales automatically to fit your needs.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
The Cloud is just a buzz word. It makes non-techies feel clued in without having to understand the differences among a handful of technologies and how they work together.
And he forgot "The cloud is just another name for timesharing." The 1960s called; it wants it glass house computing model back.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
The Cloud is just a buzz word. It makes non-techies feel clued in without having to understand the differences among a handful of technologies and how they work together.
At first I thought you were contradicting me. But you're not, necessarily.
"Cake is just a buzz word. It makes non-bakers feel clued in without having to understand the differences among a handful of ingredients and how they work together."
Combine eggs, flour, baking powder, sugar, flavourings, in just the right recipe, you get a cake.
Combine datacenter technogolies, virtualisation, parallelisation, timesharing, web based management, in just the right recipe, and you get a cloud.
This doesn't mean that "cake" or "cloud" aren't useful shorthands.
Pretend that I don't work in marketing, and thus don't enjoy the frisson of hearing new terms for old rope. If one provider offers me "cloud computing" and the other offers "software as a service", what does that tell me about the likely functional differences in their offerings?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
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.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill