Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment is now available
The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment is now available, offering an environment for customers to easily test beta, release candidate, and early production versions of PostgreSQL database engine software with the convenience and flexibility of Amazon RDS.
Customers can now start testing new features and functionality of PostgreSQL within days or weeks of new versions becoming available from the PostgreSQL community. At launch, the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment offers development, beta, and release candidate versions of the next major version of PostgreSQL. Database instances in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment are fully functional and allow complete testing of each new database engine without the hassle of having to self-install, provision, and manage a preview version of the database.
Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are priced the same as production RDS instances created in the US East (Ohio) Region.
In order to ensure production class security, performance, reliability, manageability, and availability, Amazon RDS has previously released new open source database versions only after significant testing. The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment accelerates customers' ability to test reliability, functionality, and performance improvements in the PostgreSQL database engine without waiting for the Amazon RDS integration and testing to complete, shortening their release cycle by weeks. Preview versions of PostgreSQL are available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment until the production version is released by the PostgreSQL community and subsequently released by Amazon RDS.
The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment supports both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ instances on the latest generation of instance classes (currently T2, M4, and R4), and can be encrypted at rest using KMS keys. Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are retained for a maximum period of 60 days and then are automatically deleted. Amazon RDS database snapshots can be created in the preview environment and used to create or restore database instances, but cannot be copied into or out of the environment. Instead, customers can use standard PostgreSQL dump and load functionality to load and unload their databases.
Existing Amazon RDS production SLAs do not apply to Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment instances, and customers cannot open a support ticket with Amazon Customer Support for instances created there. We have launched the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment Forum for customers and the Amazon RDS team to share information and concerns about both the candidate versions of the PostgreSQL database and the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment.
The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment is available today. For more details, refer to http://aws.amazon.com/rds/databasepreview.