*AWS also introduces lower prices for high memory Database Instances*
SEATTLE, Oct 05, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced Read Replicas, a new feature for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) that makes it even easier to scale MySQL database deployments to meet the 
performance demands of high-traffic web applications. Read Replicas allow customers to create one or more copies of a given MySQL Database Instance, which allows an application to serve read traffic from multiple database replicas. Customers can create or delete replicas in minutes using the intuitive point-and-click interface of the AWS Management Console. To get started using Read Replicas for Amazon RDS, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/.
“We’ve moved our online game databases from self-managed MySQL servers to RDS with great results,” said Nate Wiger, Sr. Manager of Online Technology at Sony Computer Entertainment America. “When we ran benchmarks comparing Amazon RDS to our hand-tuned MySQL instances, we found that Amazon RDS performed significantly better. Plus, the built-in backups have offloaded traditional DBA responsibilities from our team, which allows us to just focus on delivering great games for the PlayStation platform. Now we’re looking forward to using Read Replicas in conjunction with our Multi-AZ deployments to both scale read traffic capacity and increase fault tolerance.”
Formspring.me is a social networking site that gives people a new way to connect and share opinions, by enabling users to ask and answer questions on any topic. “Amazon RDS has helped Formspring to rapidly scale to 17 million registered users and over 1 billion questions answered, without worrying about time-consuming database administration tasks like setup and deployment, backups, software patching, and re-sizing hardware resources. Now, Read Replicas for Amazon RDS will provide even greater scaling flexibility and make it easy to serve database read traffic from multiple copies of our data,” said Ade Olonoh, CEO and Co-Founder of Formspring.
With today’s announcement, Amazon RDS customers can now add the scalability benefit of Read Replicas to the availability and durability benefits of Multi-AZ deployments. Once a Read Replica is created from a specified source Database Instance, any subsequent updates made to the source will automatically be replicated to the Read Replica. Read Replicas can be elastically added to any Amazon RDS database deployment to keep query response times fast, even as request volumes scale. With Multi-AZ, each update made to an Amazon RDS Database Instance is automatically replicated to a standby in another Availability Zone. Availability Zones are distinct, physically-separate locations with independent infrastructure. In the event of a DB Instance or Availability Zone disruption, Amazon RDS will automatically failover to the up-to-date standby so that database operations can resume quickly without administration intervention.
“Since the launch of Amazon RDS last year, customers have been using the service to quickly deploy fully-featured MySQL databases, while offloading common database administrative tasks to the service. Our customers have asked for the same friction-free experience for scaling their read traffic and today we’re excited to offer Read Replicas to meet this customer request,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services at Amazon Web Services. “Together with the Multi-AZ feature, Amazon RDS now offers advantages in scalability, multi-data center availability, elasticity and ease of administration at a fraction of the cost of operating MySQL servers on-premise.”
Also announced today, Amazon RDS has lowered prices for High Memory Database Instances, consistent with AWS’s practice of passing efficiencies on to customers in the form of lower prices. Starting today, the prices for Quadruple Extra Large Database Instances (68 GB of memory) and Double Extra Large Database Instances (34GB of memory) have been lowered by more than 15%. To learn more about this and other features of Amazon RDS, visit https://aws.amazon.com/rds/.
*Source: Amazon.com