It's not as big as it sounds -- this isn't a scalable relational database service. As far as I can see, this is just EC2 instances with mysql preinstalled.
While it does run as an instance (looks like you don't get shell access), they provide new native API calls for adding and removing nodes on demand, and they will maintain the stack and backups for you. And in the future, API calls for automatically putting replicated DBs across availability zones.
I would be less interested in it if it was not as a standalone instance per customer. Can you imagine having someone with a valid account into a shared MySQL server (and a stolen credit card) poking around all day? (especially on MySQL vulnerability announcement days)
I would be less interested in it if it was not as a standalone instance per customer.
I absolutely agree. My point was just that this seems to be Amazon wrapping up their existing service in a way which is easier to use and more marketable, rather than actually releasing something new. (Not that there is anything wrong with this, of course -- I'm sure there are many people who don't want to be bothered with figuring out how to get MySQL configured on EC2.)
I agree RDS is on the lower end of novelty and excitement... And once you have VMs and a network, what could be considered truly new? Was EBS new? We can create a clustered filesystem with GNBD exports without Amazon's help, too.
that said, it does remove one layer of complexity for the people who just want cloud-based DBs. before now we would have to either sign up with a 3rd party who would pipe data to Amazon, or manually configure EC2 instances - neither of which I particularly wanted to mess with.
