Amazon Web Services (AWS), this week honored a top customer request by allowing users to quickly spin-up managed databases using its Amazon Lightsail product.
Lightsail was first presented at the 2016 re-Invent conference. It allows customers to create virtual private servers (VPSes), on the AWS cloud in just a few clicks. Customers can choose from a variety of plans to meet their needs.
AWS has announced that Lightsail will allow you to launch managed databases. This will be available starting with MySQL versions 5.6 & 5.7. According to Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, support for PostgreSQL version 9.6 and 10. is possible.
Barr wrote that “We plan to support both the latest versions of MySQL and will do so for other databases engines as soon as they become available.”
Customers have the option of choosing between two plan tiers. Standard spins up a database within a single availability area, and High Availability which supports two availability areas and is recommended for production.
Prices for Standard plans start at $15 to $115 per monthly, depending on how much RAM, storage, and compute speed a customer selects (see table below). The High Availability plan costs between $30 and $230 per month.
[Click on the image to see a larger view.] Pricing for Lightsail managed database. (Source: AWS). Features include a data import mode, which allows users to suspend maintenance tasks while they transfer data into their database. This speeds up import times.
Customers can use an “emergency restore” feature to create a new database from a backup that was created at a specific time within the past seven days.
Barr states that users can also use snapshots for switching between High Availability and Standard plans or to “scale up to a larger database instance”. However, manual snapshots are subject to a separate charge.
You can find more information about Lightsail here.