On May 1, 2013, Vlad Fedorkov presented "Running MySQL in Amzon Cloud" to the LAMySQL group at Cross Campus.
MySQL operations for Big Data installations can be quite complicated even in general installations. Cloud environments make some of them easier, but requires at the same time more attention to some operations which in other cases would be straightforward.
What needs to be done differently? How to perform diagnostics and make sure systems are doing well? How to prevent performance issues? Which RDS specific operations you'd like to avoid? And basically how to survive in cloud with big data installations and keep them fast.
As a side note, Vlad will also provide an annual update for SphinxSearch which is now has high availability support and lots of new bight and useful features.