Any thoughts about Amazon RDS

[Rigel Kentaurus]

With all this cloudy stuff going on, I have been playing the idea of putting my database in the cloud

Amazon just enabled mysql as a service
http://aws.amazon.com/rds/

It would mean .. installing nothing, and paying for the DB instance hours, the storage, and the data transfer, of course Especially when scaling, this might prove useful. Plus, the database is supposed to have a backup

It does, however, sound a little expensive, 0.11 an hour is $80 a month, just for the instance, add another $5 for a 50 gigabyte database, plus another $5 for 50 gigabytes of bandwidth ... (and I have not taken actual measures of this, just guesstimating)

I am not sure, how the hours are calculated, though. For example if I only use it 6 minutes out of a whole hour...

I am thinking of giving a try for one month and see what the costs are like, but would love to hear about anybody else with some experience using this. I would not use it as my main database (too expensive), but this sounds good as a slave database for backup.

 

[Jason]

RDS provides pretty good performance out of the box, and its biggest benefits are automatic backups and faillover to another availability zone, quick instance scaling, and easy slave deployment. The management console is fairly nice as well. Read only slaves and high availability are just a click away. If you hate tuning (and the headaches that brings) and don't need access to the underlying file system, then it's worth looking at. Otherwise, I'd go with rolling your own solution with EC2 + EBS RAID0 (though doing EBS RAID0 requires some pretty significant maintenance overhead).

I've been using it for about 4 months now on a project, and the only major complaints we've had is that we can't run our new RDS instances as a slave for a while and later switch it over to be the new master as we disconnect the old one, as RDS does not let you run those instances as slaves. Also, as I mentioned earlier, no access to the underlying file system, so we can't simply copy over data files and then launch RDS. But other than that, we've only had about 5 minutes of downtime thus far.