Snapshots can be created and restored with bare metal if you install the right software. Only basic metrics are monitored by AWS by default (have to pay more fo

Snapshots can be created and restored with bare metal if you install the right software. Only basic metrics are monitored by AWS by default (have to pay more for more detailed monitoring) and alarms have to be specifically configured, as I recall. Note that "bare metal" doesn't necessarily mean non-virtualized; the end user can be running VMWare or Xen on owned hardware and get "cloud-style" flexibility and goodies like automatic monitoring. DB services is a different class of problem than bare metal v. cloud application servers, and cloud DB services can be used whether you run your application on bare metal or cloud instances (but, for the record, the same type of things are mostly applicable here, in that the user still has to do their own security and configuration).