Amazon RDS (MySQL server service) now provides hot standby replication

Nice addition to the product line, but there's still a gap in the market for SaaS MySQL services - need more companies like FathomDB to take away the headache of managing DBs for startups.

We're still waiting for someone to do a nice replicate-my-existing-server offering.

A useful service, but I wonder when they will also support PostgreSQL/PostGIS?

Amazon has a good story for replication, now with RDS across availability zones, and Elastic Load Balancing, etc.

I am helping a customer with some large scale AI/text mining, and I think that they will also have me help set up a split internal data center - and AWS for overload and failover. AWS is a great deployment platform, but it does take a lot of effort to use it for projects that can't just use a platform as a service provider like Heroku.

I really wish they offered a 512MB server for $0.05/hr. At $0.11, their smallest instance still costs over $80/month.

I find $80 cost-prohibitive when considered in the context of a side project that I'd like to try out.

If AWS had a cheaper, less powerful option, I'd use it in a minute, because I really like their how their pricing scales and the feature set they provide.