Amazon Fires Another Cloud Round: Relational Database Service

(MoneyWatch)  You could say that Amazon didn't know what business it wanted to be in -- retail, publishing, product development and marketing, or cloud services -- if it didn't seem to excel in all areas. And now it's taken another step to become a major cloud player, at least among small and medium businesses, by announcing a relational database service: Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

This is a big deal and important development in the shifting patterns of cloud offerings. Sometimes it seems that everyone and his or her brother is providing storage, software hosting, or full applications (whether a Salesforce.com CRM package or email). And all that is well and good, but to really take off, cloud computing is going to need robust database services to let companies run their own applications. There have been a number of database services available on the cloud, including one from Amazon.

However, simpler database structures make programming typical applications too cumbersome. What Amazon is offering is a hosted MySQL environment, which is a smart move. Companies can develop applications in-house and then use Amazon to host, scaling up as circumstances demand without having to host and maintain servers in-house as well as maintain the database software.

Among the early/beta users of the service are Adobe Systems as well as advertising platform vendor Kehalim. Amazon is also introducing new memory configurations for high intensity uses like databases and rendering. (The latter might be of particular interest to Adobe and could make you wonder if the company is planning a counter to Nvidia's rendering services.) Add in some slightly cheaper pricing on resources, and Amazon takes a commanding leading in showing the viability not just of its cloud technical architecture, but of the business alignment architecture as well. And it's a kick in the trousers for IBM, which had partnered with Amazon to provide DB2, Informix, and other tools on EC2. I'd expect IBM to push harder on rolling out something that clearly competes toe-to-toe in perception with Amazon.

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