For those of us with small (a few to a dozen servers), we'd like to get out of server maintenance completely. Can anyone with experience on a cloud VM solution comment? ...
I've done some work with Heroku and the MySQL flavor of AWS service.
Thanks, I'll check Heroku out.
For the reasons above I would caution deploying a production service (today) on a "SaaS" database service like Heroku or Amazon RDS. Running your own database inside a stock VM might be better, but it can be hard to get the right kind of I/O for that deployment scenario. In the case of self-hosted VMWare or KVM obviously you have much more control and observability.
Well, the whole point of switching to a cloud provider is to get out of the business of buying hardware and hauling it down to the co-lo facility. Adding VMWare or KVM is just one more thing we'd have to add to our sysadmin skills. We'd rather focus on our core technology, the stuff we're better at than anyone else.
So far I'm impressed by what I've read about Amazon's Postgres instances. Maybe the reality will be disappointing, but (for example) the idea of setting up streaming replication with one click is pretty appealing.