Amazon recently announced support for multi-zone MySQL instances with automatic failover. The general idea is that Amazon will make the on demand MySQL service they offer more fault tolerant, which is a wonderful thing to have. It’s not there yet, but being able to send reads to another replicated server MySQL instance is on the future feature list. When Amazon Relation Database Service (RDS) was announced it was clear that Amazon was going to continue building out core infrastructure services, so these additional high availability options are nice to see, but not a huge surprise.
As happy as I am to see Amazon doing this, my general feeling is one of disappointment that Sun didn’t do more in this area when they purchased MySQL. Not long after the Sun/MySQL deal I wrote Sun Should Be in the Consumer Cloud Services Business. My thought was that Sun should offer an EC2/S3 style pay as you go service for MySQL. And it should be open to anyone with a credit card, making this basically a consumer play, but could be used by big companies as well.
Now Sun and MySQL are in the hands of Oracle. The opportunity for Oracle to offer a similar service is still there, but I see it as being even less likely now than when it was just Sun+MySQL.
It’s surprising to me to see capable companies you might normally think of as being in the best position to offer these types of services continue to let Amazon run further and further ahead of the pack.