Users of Amazon Web Services' Relational Database Service (RDS) will now be able to manage it using the free AWS (Amazon Web Services) Management Console.
Administrators will be able to use a graphical wizard in their browser to launch or modify a database instance, according to Amazon. Other features include the ability to take a snapshot of the database, which can then be archived, or monitor read and write throughput, latency, and free storage space, Amazon said on the AWS Management web site.
Besides RDS, the AWS Management Console can be used to manage EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and CloudFront, which is Amazon's service for content delivery, including audio and video.
In the future, Amazon plans to allow management of S3 (Simple Storage Service) -- administrators will be able to create and delete storage buckets -- and the SimpleDB service.
Amazon RDS is based on MySQL 5.1 and is still in beta testing.
This is the second time in a week Amazon has improved its cloud-based database. On May 18, the company also announced a new high-availability feature called Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ), which improves reliability by automatically configuring a standby copy of the database stored in a different physical location from the original in Amazon's cloud, it said.