A year ago I would've never asked this question... but since Linode has introduced NodeBalancer, I guess the company has started moving towards a more general "tools for developers" approach (as opposed to "pure" VPS hosting), so I guess this would be doable.

In practice, it would be something like this: http://aws.amazon.com/rds/

You pay for storage and/or for queries, and that's it. No more tuning. No more having to deal with my.cnf. It scales automatically. Whatever.

It would be cool. I'd pay for it.

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nope

I know Linode has researched into this, but don't know if they are going to ever going to offer managed services.

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Larry Ludwig
Empowering Media
Managed Cloud Services and Managed VPS

NodeBalancers are a managed service actually

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nope

I don't know if I agree with that. But then again, the definition of "managed service" varies depending on the provider.

A nodebalancer is just a highly-available reverse proxy that you can pay for and plug in the settings you want. I wouldn't necessarily call that a "managed" service.

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If all else fails, reboot...
PHP Tutorials and MySQL Tutorials

I'm just using Linode's definition:

http://www.linode.com/nodebalancers/

"NodeBalancers are highly-available, managed, cloud based, "load balancers as a service"."

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nope

Yes, using their definition, they do offer managed services.

I think it would be interesting if they offered that sort of database service. In the same way it is simpler to use a nodebalancer than to get a Linode 512 for the same price and set up your own reverse proxy (and still have a SPOF) which probably can't scale "to 5,000 concurrent connections", it would make sense to use such a DB service and not have to worry about doing your own clustering to achieve High-Availability.

Some persons would want to avoid a proprietary solution for their HA management depending on the application, but others would definitely jump at it IMO. It's all about HA these days, and the easier the better.

I, for one, would definitely consider that service if it were available.

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If all else fails, reboot...

PHP Tutorials and MySQL Tutorials

Unfortunately, thanks to the ambiguity of SQL, providing generic-RDBMS-as-a-service isn't very feasible without a lot of pain, and providing a specific brand of RDBMS as a service is vendor lock-in writ large. One could call MySQL a de facto standard and go with that, but given the documented evidence that administering MySQL is dangerous to human health, it's kind of a lame standard.

This leaves two "better" options, both of which aren't that great:

1) Use some other RDBMS. This could be PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc, or it could be something homebrew. This will immediately eliminate large quantities of customers, ranging from "everyone running WordPress or Drupal" to "everyone", depending on which RDBMS is chosen.

2) Offer multiple RDBMSes. This is the approach AWS takes with their Relational Database Service offering. You essentially get an EC2 instance with MySQL or Oracle pre-installed and configured, with the possibility of replication. This is a bit of a cop-out: it's essentially a managed EC2 instance where you don't get root, and you have to manage your own partitioning and redundancy and all that. This could probably be implemented with a clever StackScript and a modest control panel.

But dang, it'd be nice.

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Even just a managed MySQL cluster would probably be a big step. Replication is a pain to set up, and proper MySQL clustering requires a license.

I'm glad I need none of these things. Well, since needing it would indicate some sort of success, perhaps I should not be glad I don't need them.