Amazon announced RDS (Relational Database Service) for PostgreSQL on Thursday, and that PostgreSQL is now available as a managed service on Amazon Web Services with up to 3TB of storage, 20,000 IOPS and support for high-availability.

Amazon RDS supports the core PostgreSQL database features, like PostGIS, free text indexing and search extensions.

Users can scale I/O operations to 30,000 IOPS per database instance. according to Amazon, achieving “consistent, fast performance.”

Users will be able to deploy production Postgre SQL apps using the multi-availability zone option, and Amazon says RDS will operate a synchronous stand-by replica with an automated fail-over mechanism. It also supports cross-region snapshot copy operations.

“Since we launched Amazon RDS four years ago, a large number of enterprises and startups have adopted the service because it allows them to run familiar relational databases without any of the operational complexity of on-premise systems, at a substantially lower cost,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services, AWS. “As mobile, web, social and geospatial applications proliferate, we have seen a steady demand for PostgreSQL as a managed service. We’re pleased to bring the agility, manageability and cost benefits of the Amazon RDS platform to PostgreSQL.”

“Thousands of enterprises rely on ArcGIS to build rich geospatial applications that combine location data with business analytics,” said Marwa Mabrouk, Cloud and Big Data Product Manager, ESRI Inc., which has been testing Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. “As our customers move their applications to the cloud, many of them choose PostgreSQL. We are excited about Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL because customers can focus on their business and not on the database administration. We think Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is simple to use, cost-effective and will enable ArcGIS developers to be more productive. We are looking forward to expanding our usage.”

The product is available around the world in every Amazon Web Services region. More info here.