I’m always happy to be able to talk about AWS options that lower costs and add flexibility for our customers.

To that end, I am pleased to announce the availability of Micro instances for Amazon RDS for the MySQL database engine. The t1.micro RDS instance is a low cost instance type designed for low traffic web applications, test applications and small projects.

As you may already know, Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Our customers have asked us for a lower priced instance type that could satisfy the needs of their less demanding applications. The micro RDS instance allows you to run a fully-featured relational database, starting at just $19 a month (2.5 cents an hour). Micros RDS instances also support Multi-AZ deployments and Read Replicas.

Micro DB instances provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources, and also allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. The Micro DB instance type is available now in all AWS Regions. See the RDS Pricing page for more information on the On Demand and Reserved Instance pricing.

— Jeff;