Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) today officially hit general availability and now offers a Service Level Agreement with a 99.95 percent uptime promise for multi-availability zone deployments.
RDS has already been on the market for three and a half years, but Amazon never considered it to be “generally available” because the company continued to add new features and hadn’t provided a Service Level Agreement for it yet.
As Amazon notes, organizations ranging from NASA’s JPL to Unilever, Flipboard and Airbnb are already using its service, and the company is processing “trillions of I/O requests every month” for what it says are “tens of thousands of businesses” that rely on the service.
For developers and organizations that rely on RDS, the big news here is obviously not the fact that Amazon now essentially considers the service to be out of beta, but that the Service Level Agreement ensures that they will receive service credits when their databases become unavailable. A 99.95 percent uptime means Amazon expects about 22 minutes per instance per month. Should that level fall under the guaranteed update, Amazon will refund 10 percent of the charges paid and 25 percent of it falls under 99 percent. It’s worth noting that this only holds for multi-availability zone deployments, however, which cost up to 50 percent more than Amazon’s standard deployments.
RDS is now one of four database solutions that Amazon offers and is probably the most traditional one, with support for MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server. It’s also an area where Google’s cloud offerings are relatively competitive, thanks to its recently updated Cloud SQL service and where Microsoft, too, is making some inroads with its own cloud-based database and big data services.