Amazon RDS – Prime Time? Time will tell

A client of ours is just getting started with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and I wonder as time marches on how popular this cloud solution is going to play out for them and Amazon as a valid/useable service offering. Many times in the past we have encountered off-the-shelf solutions from vendor A based on vendor B’s technology. The deeper we dig into that offering, the more we encounter in the available configurations that are foreign to the way we have been doing things with  vendor B’s technology. In this case, vendor A is Amazon and vendor B Oracle.

Their RDS landing page curiously enough still has the word “beta” after the herald introducing the service. I also wonder exactly what their reference clients are actually running using the AWS solution — Samsung, Newsweek and SEGA to mention a few. As clients get into the lower level database configurations available in RDS, I wonder how much flexibility adopters will have. Some of the baseline implementation details and industry-standard best practices for configuration … will they be imbedded in the plethora of picklists in the assortment of configurable database setup options?

Only time will tell and feedback from readers who may be venturing to AWS and RDS would be welcome …