Amazon has launched a hosted relational database service, Amazon RDS, as part of the suite of services available at AWS. The new service is a hosted MySQL database instance with the full capabilities and access rights as a normal self-hosted DB. As a hosted solution, instances are easily created and available almost immediately. Pricing stars at $0.11c per hour for the smallest scale specification, and is available now on the AWS site.
Unlike completely elastic hosted DB services, which abstract a large-scale cluster into a shared environment for customers, the Amazon model is to step up or down through tiers of service based on requirements. The tiers of service (with names that seem to be inspired by a fast food restaurant menu) and pricing are:
| Name | Memory | Comp | Price per hour |
| Small DB Instance | 1.7 GB | 1 ECU | $0.11 USD |
| Large DB Instance | 7.5 GB | 4 ECUs | $0.44 USD |
| Extra Large DB Instance | 15 GB | 8 ECUs | $0.88 USD |
| Double Extra Large DB Instance | 34 GB | 13 ECUs | $1.55 USD |
| Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance | 68 GB | 26 ECUs | $3.10 USD |
You also have to provision a set amount of storage, which is charged at $0.10 per GB-month (pre-provisioning means that you can run out of disk space, it wont grow out). Requests are charged at an additional $0.10 per million requests.
Backups are available (full, snapshots etc.) and backup space equivelant to the provisioned storage space is available for free. Additional space is $0.15 per month. Data transfer is charged at the standard AWS rates, with no charge for data transfers between AWS services (ie. if you have your web server at one host, and the DB with AWS, you will be charged for all the traffic between the web server and the DB).
AWS offer a large range of services, and full RDBMS hosting seemed like an obvious service to offer. AWS has the existing SimpleDB service, which is a key-value based data store.
My initial take on the new RDS service is that it seems that it involves pre-defined and pre-configured EC2 instances with MySQL running. This makes the task of creating and starting new DB instances easier, but does not mean that your resource allocation will automatically grow and scale with resource requirements. There are existing third-party services, such as Fathom, that are built on AWS and use EC2 to create and manage DB instances.
Your application will have to recognize that more resources are required, and make the appropriate API calls to either step up or down along the tiers of instances available. RDS, like most AWS services, provides building blocks for developers to use.
Update: Amazon has now officially announced the service on the AWS blog.
This is a big deal for any start up. At least I know it is for gooseGrade.com!
hmmm wow.. that’s pretty expensive…
I agree – I don’t see why it should be several cents more than a standard e2 instance – especially when you have services such as scalr. And if you have a master / slave (which is still unclear if the new service supports m/s automation) you could start to really get more costly with this new setup.
Totally agree. 11c per hour = roughly $80 per month for a single hosted database? I can get a dedicated server for that price and host several MySQL databases on it. Or have I read their pricing wrong? It’s kinda strange to charge by the hour….
It’s just about cloud / utility hosting; we use Amazon stuff as extra capacity to our dedicated servers for peaks or short-lived bottlenecks. Hiring fulltime it is only for the big companies. But it does take all headaches away from hosting; you don’t have to do much yourself, only program some monitoring services that monitor your health/performance and add services based on that. You cannot really do that with dedicated systems.
But the ‘real dream’ is not there yet; just throwing in whatever your want and then autoscale by the hoster. If someone would build that :/ This is nothing more than very automated VPS hosting.
Ofcourse Appengine and vapourware Azure have what I hinted at, but Appengine really isn’t all that great if you don’t change your way of building apps totally. Which, for a real cloud system, shouldn’t really be needed. Just want to throw an existing php/ruby/java/whatever app into the clould and have it scale auto by paying more.
I am building this kind of service.
Based on EC2.
Would you be interested in being first (paying) customer?
email me : phpappe at gmail
Azure is hardly vaporware. And, the SQL on azure solution is much more powerful and flexible than the aws offering. Do your homework.
Expensive…pfft.
Go look at the rates the US gov’t charges its internal customers. 30K per year sound outrageous enough?
I agree, too expensive.
Nice, Cloud Computing seems to be getting ready for mainstream users
(like me)
WAIT is it 0.11 cents or 0.11 USD per hour???
HAHAHA! I wonder, though, if backup is even necessary as it is hosted in the cloud? I suppose that backup would be good for human error, such as accidental data loss due to a bad command or something of the sort.
Even so, $0.11 per hour is expensive for any startup. When you figure in the cost of the infrastructure you get with Amazon, I suppose it does become a bit more realistic.
well it’s not really ‘cloud’, more like a real server but because it is virtualized on their end it means they can charge on a finer scale
for a more ‘cloud’ style DB host which charges on computation time, storage etc. plus is more elastic, checkout Rackspace Cloud (this site is hosted there) or GoGrid, etc.
there are pros/cons to each approach – AWS is about giving you the building blocks to build yourself what these other services do for you.
We’ve had instances drop out entirely with no recovery. We’ve also lost a whole EBS volume, unrecoverable, in a big Amazon fubar this last year.
No matter what, Amazon isn’t infallible. It’s up to you to make one more offsite backup. The MySQL service is awesome, but it runs on top of a bunch of mostly-reliable, physical boxes that will probably die on you at some point.
Cloud != panacea (except for small values of panacea)
You are right, should be treated no different to just bringing up a service at any other host. I think the problem is around what people think ‘cloud’ is and what it does. AWS shouldn’t be lumped in with the service providers who are more ‘one stop’ and actually do everything.
These new Amazon services are basically just specialized EC2 images with fancy command-line interfaces. Don’t get me wrong though – we’re already managing MySQL on EC2 and this is clearly takes a big load off our shoulders. It’s worth the extra 10% over the old instance price.
Amazon really is building an amazing buffet of services around the EC2 infrastructure. I’m really happy that we settled on it as our architecture of choice moving forward.
0.11 American dollars, or 11 American cents, per American hour.
how many minutes is an american hour?
60
an American hour? i didn’t know us American’s had laid claim to the hour as ours. is there any other kind of hour?
Not nearly enough, man. Not nearly enough.
depends which state your in
the imperial system is as confusing as AWS pricing
Pretty interesting. We run a lot of our stuff on MySQL on EC2 today, so we will be looking at whether this option is more efficient. Happy to see the effort to climb the value stack by Amazon and the competition and health innovation this will drive with Azure and AppEngine.
Is that $0.11 for “process” time, or elapsed time?
Because $81.84 ($0.00 x 24 x 31) is very expensive compared to what I’m paying for hosting now.
run time (elapsed) as opposed to CPU time
Is this the same as putting your DB file on EBS and running standard EC2’s with MySQL setup to connect to the data stored on the EBS? Wouldn’t that be cheaper? I applaud AWS for adding new services but the billing it getting more and more confusing.
Sure it would be marginally cheaper to do it yourself, but then you have to write all those scripts. I already have a working setup and am chomping at the bit to switch to this as I can completely stop thinking about this and work on features that add more value to my application. No one pays you for your infrastructure, it is simply a means to an ends.
It appears that the service is exactly the same as running on EB2 and snapshotting to EBS/S3. The big benefit for you is that the scripts are developed and tested by Amazon engineers with access to the EBS team for tuning, automated patches installed by Amazon and a decent API to manage it all.
Once you start using it, the pricing becomes pretty clear. All the EC2 prices are just multiples of the base instance. Managed services on top of EC2 (hadoop/mysql) are constant multiples (0.10 -> 0.11, etc).
EBS is a little funky, because noone counts usage in I/O operations besides Amazon.
A disadvantage here is that they’re running the instances on a single EBS volume to give you snapshot abilities.
But if you run MySQL on EC2 yourself, you can run it on a virtual RAID array of EBS volumes, which increases IO performance. You can get more performance from the same size instance compared to these new Amazon-managed instances.
Natural progression. AWS is slowly creeping towards providing PAAS for its cloud.
Not quite. They are still sticking toward giving you specialized servers. PAAS more involves abstracting away servers, as my startup (PiCloud) does for job offloading.
It’s not to expensive if people are already on something like a Media Temple DV Server which is $150 a month, the question what is the side by side difference which would warrant moving to a cloud server. I’ve debated that myself and we’ve decided to just stay on MT grid, move up to DV and when that is maxed then consider migration to some EC2 service. We just won’t know until we have that problem and by then it would be a good problem to. I agree however it is not too pricey for a start up but probably overkill for the first year.
I hate to break it to you, but anyone paying MT prices is already overpaying by a lot. The MT DV line is a joke.
What are some good alternatives?
Human race will extinct because of clouds!!!
Are the Backups automatic/real-time?
Or
Are we supposed to take backups ourselves?
I’m not a dba or sys admin, but I think generally speaking db infrastructure shouldn’t be elastic because auto scaling stateful resources is expensive & dangerous in terms of runaway replication. If a timeout occurs on a db request it doesn’t necessarily mean that db is down. It’s possible that the query being called caused contention that would then be passed to the next replication. So in those cases query optimization would be necessary.
You are right, and most of the ‘cloud’ services will set hard limits on connections. The diff is that category of service is also full managed etc.
Absolutely. These will be great as dev & qa instances too cuz assuming they follow the standard pricing model you could kill them at will and save a lot of money over time.
wow this is a real game changer here.
Many dedicated servers run as low as $100 a month with unlimited BW 10MBps with 500gb.
Anyone here completed a cost analysis?
You can keep a small set-up running for about $70/mo, and just spin up/down instances if/ when you (don’t) need them. Cost really comes down to what your application is and how efficient your project is at utilizing the resources.
The name of the game is fast db access. From the article I could not figure out how many instances of mysql could run in parallel on multiple CPUs or virtual machines.
Do an experiment and find out. Since you only pay by the hour, it’s virtually free to try.
Spin up a 64GB 20 core instance if you’d like. That kind of real hardware would cost ya hundreds, maybe over a thousand, just to set up at any other host.
At Amazon, if your experiment takes an hour, you just spent $3.
If you only needed a small instance, it would’ve cost you $0.08.
See my comment on ReadWriteWeb about RDS. If you need “fast db access”, Amazon RDS MAY not be a good solution at all.
I/O is so slow that any write operations are painful. If you are just doing queries with few writes, RDS on a 4XL 64GB instance is amazing.
Isn’t it great how the web can reinvent itself every 24 months!
We used to talk about ASP (Application Service Providers). Now ASP has been replaced with SaaS (Software as a Service). Which basically means the exact same thing.
We used to talk about Virtual Hosting, now we’re somehow infatuated with the word ‘Cloud’.
It’s the exact same thing!
The cloud, like virtual hosting, is expensive!
I agree with @Matt Lawson: Dedicated servers are dirt cheap for what you’re getting.
Cloud fanatics will say that these servers aren’t scalable, but 99% of all biz simply don’t need to scale beyond 1 or 2 servers.
Most biz don’t have the problems of Twitter and Facebook. In other words we don’t need the Cloud.
It sounds like heresy and maybe it is.
But the facts are that we don’t really need elastic computing and the price of elastic computing is simply too high.
Don’t think that clouds require less maintenance.
You will still need geeks to manage your EC instances. So what have you actually gained from EC?
The ability to try different hardware configurations without thousands of dollars of up front prices, and at many providers, long-term contracts.
Hardware is dirt cheap. Talking about thousands of dollars investment is hyperbolic.
And lets be honest here, you decide your hardware config up front and never look back on it. That’s why we always over provision on stuff like memory and disk space.
Besides, my hosting provider loves long term contracts. That’s money in the bag for them.
I’m confused. You were making arguments against virtual hosting, now everything you’ve written is an argument for it.
Over provisioning on memory and disk space? Not a problem if you virtualize. You can scale down if you find you have excess resources. And you can figure out exactly what resources you really needed with some quick load testing on a virtual setup. Then buy the RIGHT physical hardware without overspending.
And there are no long term contracts. With any hosting you’re committing to AT LEAST a month. If you need 3 hefty servers to run your site, that could easily be $1000.
WIth Amazon you can start at $1-2 for an hour with the same virtual hardware. If you find it’s more than you needed, you’re not stuck with it all month, you stop using it and stop getting billed for it.
Dan, I think we’re the type of people that will go on forever debating which ‘religion’ erm…. ‘choice’ is the best option
In the end it simply comes down to COST. For our SaaS service we went for a hosted solution with just two servers. We thought about EC2, but the costs are simply higher.
Like I said, hardware is dirt cheap. The machines we have running right now are more than capable of handling all the traffic.
We never need to scale up / use elastic computing to service all requests. (we’re not Twitter)
Not only is the hardware cheap, the dedicated hosting is cheap as well. Our dedicated hosting costs me less than an average EC2 setup. And I get far more bandwidth in return.
It’s true that I had to invest in hardware, but the hardware will be running for multiple years. It’s not like the machines will melt!
So, our dedicated hosting setup simply costs less. Even with the added hardware costs!
Glad to see someone else applying common sense here. Servers are dirt cheap and the vast majority of online businesses that are successful do not need to be hosted over more than a single server, in fact many successful sites can run on the very same server (think managed, dedicated servers, not bottom-feeder shared hosting). I think the obsession with massive traffic numbers to make profit is over-stated because the business models often mentioned in TechCrunch require such big numbers. Not so for e-commerce.
Twinkle Toes writes:
Don’t think that clouds require less
maintenance.
You will still need geeks to manage your EC
instances.
I disagree. One of the main value propositions of cloud computing is the outsourcing of hardware/software maintenance. Sure, you need to manage your instances, but you don’t have to worry about patches/upgrades, security (at least at an OS level), redundancy and availability.
Also, Andrew makes a good point here for businesses that have very predictable computational resource requirements and are not likely to have a significantly increased load anytime soon. However, those that do not may require the scalability that cloud computing offers.
Why are they charging users for beta testing their system?
Because unlike selling access to a webapp, where your cost to them is a row in a database, they’re providing services that cost them money.
htmlencode()
Does this support master/slave configurations? If not, it’s pretty limited.
I agree – this would be crucial
Seriously, how is this cloud computing if it can’t scale using distributed MySQL functionality like master/slave?
it’s good I like it already.
MySQL on cloud will definitely help Relational Databases to remain relevant.
Hahah!! are they copying from SmartBaza?
http://www.SmartBaza.com
lame attempt at spam. go somewhere else for that.
That page still has “Lorem ipsum” on it haha
The price is a little expensive compared to some dedicated servers. The point might be how the disk IO performs, and the CPU?
“Data transfer is charged at the standard AWS rates, with no charge for data transfers between AWS services (ie. if you have your web server at one host, and the DB with AWS, you will be charged for all the traffic between the web server and the DB).”
I think you left out a “not” somewhere…..
this is expensive cheaper to run your own mysql server in an instance, backup to an EBS volume and create a regular snapshot.
Can anyone recommend good dedicated hosting providers?
I’m in the planning stages for a startup, and need a good hosting provider than can scale (e.g. I can move from VPS to dedicated and more).
Amazon EC2 looks good, because I don’t have to pay any upfront costs…but pricing is too complicated and hard to predict future pricing. Plus performance is too abstract that it requires more thinking, so therefore is more expensive with respect to my time.
Most of my company’s sites run on Amazon EC2, but we do still have some physical servers at Softlayer. I can highly recommend them. They have their own cloud hosting services too.
Sounds like a good option!
fathomdb.com is the perfect service. A managed MySQL hosting on AWS.