#66 – Amazon RDS – Coming to a vSphere Cluster Near You

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware recently announced that RDS, the Relational Database Service was in tech preview as an on-premises deployment on vSphere.  Running a service outside of Amazon’s data centre represents a big change for the company.  The only non-core offering to date has been Snowball, the edge data appliance.  In this week’s recording, Martin and Chris discuss the implications of running a service on-premises, what’s in it for the customer, for VMware and for AWS.

The database market is a lucrative business.  It’s reasonable to expect that end users will look to optimise their costs and to avoid those nasty annual audits of usage.  If businesses can get their heads around the idea of a service for which they have had to make the capital expenditure investment, then perhaps there’s an opportunity for significant savings.

But how exactly will it work?  Will AWS have access to your vSphere clusters?  Will they remotely manage maintenance, upgrades and recovery?

As well as the podcast, you can read more thinking in this blog post, also published today:

AWS and VMware Partner to Bring RDS for the Enterprise

Elapsed Time: 00:30:37

Timeline

• 00:00:00 – Intros
• 00:00:30 – VMworld 2018 and ruining bank holidays
• 00:01:00 – AWS RDS – now available on-premises
• 00:02:24 – What is the Relational Database Service?
• 00:03:35 – Why (would DevOps) use RDS?
• 00:04:30 – The licensing nightmare of databases
• 00:05:00 – What’s bad about RDS – anything?
• 00:06:00 – What SLAs do AWS offer for RDS?
• 00:07:30 – The Instapaper outage
• 00:09:00 – Who doesn’t like a good argument on storage with a DBA?
• 00:09:35 – What is RDS on-premises, exactly?
• 00:11:30 – How is Amazon exposed by allowing on-premises deployments?
• 00:13:30 – How will pricing and billing work?
• 00:15:00 – How do the commercial database vendors feel about this offering?
• 00:19:20 – Who benefits from RDS on-premises?
• 00:25:00 – What does Amazon/AWS gain here?
• 00:26:30 – Is RDS on VMware just a big sales tool?
• 00:29:14 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

• AWS and VMware Partner to Bring RDS for the Enterprise
• VMworld 2018 – Divergent VMware
• VMware Cloud on AWS – What We Know So Far
• Cloud Data Migration – Database Import Tools
• Learning from The Instapaper Outage

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