From: Amazon Web Services
Date: October 27, 2009 1:25:00 AM PDT
To: scot
Subject: Announcing Amazon Relational Database Service, plus Amazon EC2 price drop and High Memory Instances

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We are excited to announce the public beta of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a new web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale relational databases in the cloud. Amazon RDS gives you all the features and capabilities of a MySQL database, while managing time-consuming database administration tasks and providing the cost-efficiency of running in the AWS cloud. We're also excited to announce lower prices for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and a new family of Amazon EC2 High-Memory Instances, tailored for customers wanting to run their own large databases and other memory intensive applications. To get started using Amazon RDS, High-Memory Instances for Amazon EC2, and other Amazon Web Services, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

Amazon RDS provides a fully featured MySQL database, so the code, applications, and tools that you use today with your existing MySQL databases work in Amazon RDS without modification. The service automatically handles common database administration tasks, such as setup and provisioning, patch management, and backup. You also have the flexibility to scale the compute and storage resources associated with your database instance through a simple API call. Like all AWS infrastructure services, Amazon RDS is easy to deploy and simple to manage. Here are some highlights for Amazon RDS:

• Simple to Deploy - Quickly create a new production-ready relational database with a simple API call.
• Managed - Amazon RDS handles generic, time-consuming database management tasks, such as patch management and backup.
• Compatible - All of your existing MySQL database tools, applications, and drivers will still work.
• Scalable - With a simple API call you can scale the compute and storage resources available to your database to meet your business needs and application load.
• Reliable - Amazon RDS runs on the same highly reliable infrastructure used by other Amazon Web Services. Amazon RDS also gives you additional peace of mind by providing an automated database backup facility.
• Inexpensive - You pay very low rates and only for the resources you actually consume. There are no long-term contracts or up-front commitments to use Amazon RDS.

For more information on Amazon RDS pricing and features, please visit http://aws.amazon.com/rds.

We are also pleased to introduce a new family of High-Memory Instances for Amazon EC2. This new instance family further expands the available selection of computing configurations for Amazon EC2, helping you choose the CPU capacity, memory resources, and networking throughput that your applications require. High-Memory Instances are designed to be used with memory-intensive workloads such as databases, caching, and rendering, and are optimized for low-latency, high-throughput performance. The instance specifications are:

• Double Extra Large: 34.2 GB memory, 13 ECU (4 virtual cores with 3.25 ECU each), 850 GB storage, 64-bit platform
• Quadruple Extra Large: 68.4 GB memory, 26 ECU (8 virtual cores with 3.25 ECU each), 1690 GB storage, 64-bit platform.

Please visit the Amazon EC2 page for additional information on these High-Memory instances.

Finally, we are also lowering prices on all Amazon EC2 On-Demand compute instances, effective on November 1st. Charges for Linux-based instances will drop 15% -- a small Linux instance will now cost just 8.5 cents per hour of computing, compared to the previous price of 10 cents per hour. For more details by instance type and region, please visit the Amazon EC2 page.

Sincerely,

The Amazon Web Services Team