Amazon just announced the new feature for Amazon RDS.

Amazon RDS – Multi-AZ Deployments For Enhanced Availability & Reliability

Amazon RDS simplifies many of the common tasks associated with the deployment, operation, and scaling of a relational database. You don’t have to worry about acquiring and installing hardware, loading an operating system, installing and configuring MySQL, or managing backups. In addition, scaling the processing power or storage space available to your database is as simple as an API call.

When we rolled out Amazon RDS last October, we also announced plans to have a “High Availability” option in the future. That option is now ready for you to use, and it’s called “Multi-AZ Deployments.” AZ is short for “Availability Zone”; each of the four AWS Regions is comprised or two or more such zones, each with independent power, cooling, and network connectivity.

The availability and reliability characteristics of Multi-AZ deployments make them well suited for critical production environments.

Read more about Amazon RDS – Multi-AZ Deployment

Maintaining a production DB containing 15-25M rows show best improvement with the use of RAID0 on EC2 platform. Having a MySQL master-slave replication of servers and keeping the documented procedure is very handy for restoring the DB and the RAID volumes.

Documenting the process on downgrading and upgrading RAID0+MySQL from large to xlarge EC2 instance or vice versa helps a lot.

The links below best describes the RAID0 performance for IO operations on EC2 and how to setup the EBS RAID0 and MySQL in your machine.

RAID0 Refrences
IO Performance on EBS
EC2 EBS SINGLE AND-RAID VOLUMES IO BENCHMARK
EC2 EBS RAID
mdadm: A New Tool For Linux Software RAID Management
Running MySQL on Amazon EC2 with Elastic Block Store

MySQL Tools
EC2 Consistent Snapshot
Using Maatkit to restore Slave-Master
Maatkit.Org
MySQL Sandbox
Auto MySQL Backup