Why Amazon RDS?

Amazon RDS is managed. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easier for you to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. With a few clicks of an intuitive point-and-click console, you can provision a managed, re-sizable MySQL deployment.

The service handles time-consuming database management tasks so you can pursue higher value application development. If you are managing your own MySQL deployment today, you can move to Amazon RDS and gain the benefit of the following:

More on Key Features

• Enterprise-Grade Replication, Automatic Failover – With a single click, you can run your Database Instance as a Multi-AZ deployment. This means Amazon RDS will transparently provision and maintain a synchronously replicated “standby” in a different Availability Zone (independent infrastructure in a separate location) to protect your most recent data updates and enhance database availability. In the event of a planned or unplanned outage, Amazon RDS will automatically failover to the up-to-date standby so that you can resume database updates as quickly as possible and minimize impact to your business.

• Point-in-time Restore – Turned on by default, the automated backup feature of Amazon RDS enables point-in-time recovery for your DB Instance. Amazon RDS will backup your database and transaction logs and store both for a user-specified retention period. This allows you to restore your DB Instance to any second during your retention period, up to the last five minutes.

Total Cost of Ownership

Amazon RDS DB Instance compute costs vary based on the DB Instance class (Small to Quadruple Extra Large) you have provisioned and whether you have opted for a standard or Multi-AZ deployment. You can then provision from 5 GB to 1 TB of storage per Database Instance at a cost of $.10 per GB-month. Click on the pricing tab of this page to learn more about Amazon RDS pricing.

You may, however, be comparing the costs of Amazon RDS against running a MySQL deployment on premise or at a Co-location provider. The TCO for these deployments are compared against the TCO of a comparable Amazon RDS deployment in the chart below. The chart depicts the TCO for the equivalent of 5 Extra Large Amazon RDS DB Instances. For simplicity, the calculations below quantify only the most direct costs of owning or co-locating database infrastructure and ignore many indirect economic benefits of Amazon RDS such as flexibility, scalability and faster time-to-market. Indirect costs of owning and co-locating infrastructure such as data center security, excess capacity, cost of procuring and provisioning hardware, etc. are ignored.

TCO Assumptions: 10% cost of capital; RDS hosting in US-East; 80% annual utilization, 25GB monthly storage and 15 million monthly I/O requests per each RDS instance; cost of hardware with equivalent computing capacity and memory is $2900/instance, with nameplate power as 391W and annual maintenance cost as $290/instance; Database administration costs for RDS is 25% of the on-site/co-location scenarios; power per rack U is 57W for co-location and 119W for on-site; $30 per U/month co-location expense

Who’s Using Amazon RDS?

Amazon.com
Amazon.com’s Customer Experience Analytics Team uses Amazon Relational Database Service to store and query customer simulation data.

Tapjoy
Tapjoy partners with leading Apple iPhone and Android publishers to help monetize their virtual goods and improve their distribution, relying on Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, and Amazon SQS to run its application.

Digitaria
Digitaria uses Amazon RDS to create cost-effective virtual hosting environments for their client’s websites.

United Football League

Washington Post

Flipboard

Pricing

On-Demand DB Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour your DB Instance runs with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs. Alternatively, you can reserve a DB Instance for a 1 or 3 year term by paying a low, one-time fee. In return, you will receive a significant discount off the hourly Amazon RDS rate.

Compute Resources (On Demand, Standard Deployment)

Provisioned Database Storage

For each DB Instance class, Amazon RDS provides you the ability to select from 5 GB to 1 TB of associated storage capacity for your primary data set.

Additional Pricing Information

Amazon RDS provides a free level of backup storage for your DB Instance, but charges for backup storage beyond the free threshold. Charges for data transfer also apply. To see complete pricing for Amazon RDS (including Reserved DB Instance or Multi-AZ deployment pricing, click here.

The following links should help you get started with Amazon RDS:

Getting Started

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• Getting Started Guide
• Documentation
• AWS Management Console
• WSDL
• Release Notes
• Sample Code and Libraries
• Developer Tools
• Articles & Tutorials
• DB Instance Sizing Guide
• Monitoring User Guide
• MySQL Data Import Guide
• Parameter Group Deployment Guide
• Community Forum

Additional Product Information

• Amazon RDS Full Product Page
• Pricing
• Service FAQs
• Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement
• Service Health Dashboard

Related Services

• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS Premium Support