We are excited to announce the public beta of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a new web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale relational databases in the cloud. Amazon RDS gives you all the features and capabilities of a MySQL database, while managing time-consuming database administration tasks and providing the cost-efficiency of running in the AWS cloud. We’re also excited to announce lower prices for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and a new family of Amazon EC2 High-Memory Instances, tailored for customers wanting to run their own large databases and other memory intensive applications. To get started using Amazon RDS, High-Memory Instances for Amazon EC2, and other Amazon Web Services, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

The concept of using web-based programs like Google’s Gmail is “worse than stupidity”, according to a leading advocate of free software.

via Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder | Technology | guardian.co.uk.