Kudos to RDS's SLA, proving the point of the public cloud

If you go and spin a new RDS server, you'll see this new page added before the wizard:

My perception over the last months is that AWS improved RDS availability, multi-AZ, and they are pushing it more aggressively.

An availability factor of "three and a half nines" (~8hr/year of downtime) is very very good, it usually has a very high price tag attached to it (hardware, software & labor) and usually is a dream for the smaller-medium IT organizations.

Enabling it on a utility low price, 25%-33% higher than the corresponding EC2 machine, RDS makes a real bargain for everyone, making it harder to stay out of public cloud.