I'm sure you'll have heard about Amazon Web Services's storage cloud (S3)and most likely their EC2 cloud as well, but now they're adding what they're calling RDS to the mix - a Relational Database as a Service. I think this is something Amazon will make an absolute fortune on as the reports are showing that costs will vary depending on storage space and the data transfer costs. On top of this they will also have an optional charge for backups, which can be retained for as long as the user wishes.
The way this works is a front-end layer which the user interacts with which makes calls to a MySQL 5.1 backend - each of these requests is also something which is chargeable by Amazon. If they do charge for reads and writes to the database on top of the charges for data transfer and storage then I think it's going a bit far as you're basically paying for the same thing twice. Hopefully that report will turn out to be incorrect though when their official announcement goes out later today.
