Amazon has released a new cloud service, the relational database service.  The service allows a sysadmin to launch an EC2 instance running MySQL without the trouble of patch management and backup.  The instance is fully MySQL compliant so any code which runs against a MySQL database should be fully functional, including native MySQL connectors.

While the Amazon instances are fairly scalable, there is no word yet on clustering multiple instances for redundancy or capacity.

Outside of Amazon’s marketing speak, it also saves the headache of trying to save your MySQL data to elastic block store instead of to your ec2 storage, which isn’t persistent.

From Amazon’s point of view, RDS will increase the ease of use of EC2 and probably sell more instances.