Elastra, a 40-customer SMB-directed start-up that provides a legacy-embracing configuration management service for Amazon Web Services (AWS) - your basic in-a-click virtual deployment, monitoring and accounting beginning with RDBMSes like MySQL, Postgres and EnterpriseDB - has picked up a $12 million second round from - surprise, surprise - Amazon, Bay Partners and existing investor Hummer Winblad.

Maybe the investment will convince Elastra not to go cloud-agnostic/anti-cloud silo like it plans - unless it becomes a cloud standard.

It uses two homegrown markup languages (no scripting here) to get to the cloud. (The stuff of standards?)

Amazon also has money in Ruby-on-Rails cloud play Engine Yard, part of the $15 million the start-up raised last month.

Elastra, run by former Plumtree CEO Kirill Sheynkman (pictured), took in a $2.6 first round last year to create massively scalable database clusters on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and owes many of its clients to a partnership with EnterpriseDB.

The new money is earmarked for software development and enterprise marketing. It's building support for VMware (think private clouds) as well as for the LAMP stack.