DEV Community

Asad Ullah
Asad Ullah

Posted on • Edited on

Do we need AWS RDS?

Like many AWS services, AWS RDS is built on top of AWS EC2. This leads to the question that why would we opt for RDS when we can run our own DB in a memory optimized EC2 instance with high performance volume attached? Using EC2 and our custom DB install will save us extra cost of RDS, right?

  • Yes, when our system is not sensitive to high availability.
  • No, when our system is sensitive to high availability and performance.

RDS provides many critical capabilities required for an highly available architecture. With RDS, we don't need to worry about:

  • Automated provisioning
  • Database engine & OS patching
  • Continuous backup and restore in exact point in time
  • Read replicas for increased read performance
  • Monitoring dashboards
  • Multi AZ setup for disaster recovery
  • Vertical and horizontal scalability.

Top comments (0)