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AWS Lets Users Spin Up Databases via Lightsail
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week honored a "top customer request" by allowing users to quickly spin up managed databases with its Amazon Lightsail product.
First unveiled at the 2016 re:Invent conference, Lightsail enables customers to launch virtual private servers (VPSes) on the AWS cloud in a few clicks. Customers can choose among several plans for the configuration and price point that best suits their needs.
This week, AWS announced the ability to launch managed databases through Lightsail, starting with MySQL versions 5.6 and 5.7. Support for PostgreSQL versions 9.6 and 10 is in the offing, according to a blog post by AWS evangelist Jeff Barr.
"We plan to support the two latest versions of MySQL, and will do the same for other database engines as we make them available," Barr wrote.
Customers can pick between two plan tiers: Standard, which spins up a database in a single availability zone, and High Availability, which supports two availability zones and is recommended for production use.
Pricing for Standard plans ranges from $15 to $115 per month, depending on the amount of RAM, storage, compute and data speeds that a customer chooses (see table below). The High Availability plan ranges from $30 to $230 per month.
[Click on image for larger view.] Pricing for Lightsail managed databases. (Source: AWS)
Features include a "data import mode," which lets users suspend maintenance tasks while they transfer data to their database, resulting in faster import times.
An "emergency restore" feature allows customers to create a new database using a backup created from a specific point in time in the past seven days.
Users can also use snapshots to switch between Standard and High Availability plans, or to "scale to a larger database instance," according to Barr. Manual snapshots incur a separate charge, however.
More information on Lightsail is available here.