After three and a half years in operation, Amazon Web Services’ RDS (Relational Database Service) has finally reached generally availability.  Now users can get a service-level agreement if they run the database in multiple places.

Much like other Amazon services, the hosted database service includes set-up, operations, and scaling.  For instance, AWS provides the RDS service with automatic software patches, as well as the ability to automatically back up the database.

RDS uses standard database interfaces, thus existing enterprise development and reporting tools that already talk to relational databases will work with RDS as well.  This makes RDS an easy replacement for the larger existing databases, such as Oracle and DB2.

While AWS provides several different database options, RDS seems to be a popular choice, as enterprises relocate database operations to the cloud.  Now that it’s released, including more commitments from AWS, it should be much more attractive to enterprise IT.  Indeed, it seems to be the closest thing to a drop-in replacement of the larger DB players.