Not a fan of RDS. It has all the same drawbacks of using an EBS partition for storage, but as far as I know you have no visibility (like await, iowat etc) to know when your storage subsystem starts to flake out. EBS removes a lot of Sysadmin & DBA headaches, but when you suddenly get mysterious DB stalls, good luck trying to figure out what's wrong.<p>I've worked with some systems that used a software RAID10 array of EBS volumes, and when a single EBS volume started to flake out, they'd just kick it out of the array, and performance would improve. They'd then rebuild the failed replica during off hours. If you're going to rely on EBS for DB storage for anything in production, this seems like this is the way to go.
About $8.60/month with a 3 year buy in. Not bad.<p>I will try one for a few weeks and see what kind of performance it provides.<p>I was hoping that Heroku's new PostgreSQL service would be a good option for a hosted easy to use database but I have lots of small projects and Heroku's offerings are per database not per virtualized database server.
This is a great update. You certainly don't want to put anything production on here, but small applications would be great with this. Even a properly cached WP blog (low traffic) would do just fine on here.<p>The automatic backups and rollback in RDS is worth way more than $19 alone.
I sure wish they would allow the slaving of RDS instances to non-RDS instances (aka CHANGE MASTER TO). I would love to host a MySQL slave at Amazon AWS.<p>Sure, I can get this done with an EC2 instance but how killer would a "DR slave" with rollbacks and automatic backup features be? Besides feature-sets I could eliminate quite a few delayed replication nodes and dedicated DR servers at hosted providers if they would offer this feature.
This is actually a small example of how Amazon keeps being aggressively competitive by making the pricepoint almost impossible for anyone else to match at scale.
Currently for one of my sites we have the web server and MySQL database on one medium instance. I assume performance would be a lot worse on a micro rds and same web box?