Amazon Relational Database Service

What is Amazon Relational Database Service?

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed service by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that simplifies setting up, operating, and scaling relational databases in the cloud. It supports multiple database engines, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. RDS automates tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups, allowing developers to focus on building applications.

Why Amazon RDS?

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is an easy-to-manage relational database service optimized for total cost of ownership. It is simple to set up, operate, and scale with demand. Amazon RDS automates undifferentiated database management tasks, such as provisioning, configuring, backing up, and patching. Amazon RDS allows customers to create a new database in minutes and offers flexibility to customize databases to meet their needs across eight engines and two deployment options. Customers can optimize performance with features like Multi-AZ with two readable standbys, optimized writes and reads, and AWS Graviton3-based instances, and they can choose from multiple pricing options to effectively manage costs.

Benefits of Amazon RDS

1. Easy to manage:

• Easy to set up and deploy
• Manage database administrative tasks
• Monitor and view database metrics
• Scale infrastructure with AWS CloudFormation
• Turn on event notifications with subscriptions and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
• Enhance security and compliance with configuration governance
• Database cloning
• Safer, simpler, faster upgrades with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Blue/Green Deployments
• Analyze Amazon RDS data using zero-ETL integrations with Amazon Redshift
• Best practice recommendations

2. Customizable performance:

• Choice of General Purpose and Provisioned IOPS SSD storage options
• Add an Amazon ElastiCache cache to Amazon RDS databases
• Diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks with Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS
• Improve write throughput with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Optimized Writes
• Improve query processing with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Optimized Reads

3. High availability and durability:

• Access point-in-time recovery with automated backups
• Perform user-initiated backups with database snapshots
• Achieve high availability with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Multi-AZ deployments
• Use Amazon Aurora Global Database for globally distributed applications

4. Security and compliance:

• Protect data with encryption at rest and in transit
• Run database instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for network isolation
• Control actions of AWS users and groups with resource-level permissions
• Achieve compliance with key industry compliance programs
• Threat detection with Amazon GuardDuty

5. High scalability:

• Power your database with push-button compute scalability
• Simply scale your storage
• Elastically scale out with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Read Replicas
• Increase resiliency and scalability with Amazon RDS Proxy
• Auto-scale with Aurora Serverless v2

6. Cost-effective:

• Pay only for what you use
• Receive significant discounts using Reserved Instances
• Stop and start database instances
• Improve price performance and predictability at scale with Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized
• Start building with the AWS Free Tier
• Choice of commercial licensing options

7. Developer productivity:

• Safely write extensions with Trusted Language Extensions (TLE) for PostgreSQL

8. Integrate with AI and ML:

• Enable ML-based predictions with Amazon Aurora machine learning
• Perform vector similarity searches and store embeddings

9. Choice of deployment environments:

• Easily manage your database needs as a fully managed cloud database service
• Deploy Amazon RDS on premises with Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts
• Gain privileged access with Amazon RDS Custom

10. Flexible migration options:

• Perform homogenous and heterogeneous migrations with AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)
• Assess and convert source schema with AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT)
• Migrate using familiar native tools
• Migrate to Aurora PostgreSQL using Babelfish

11. Additional features and capabilities:

• MySQL community features
• MariaDB community features
• PostgreSQL community features
• Oracle Database options
• Microsoft SQL Server options

Features by Amazon RDS engine

Innovating with Amazon RDS

1. Aurora:

Amazon Aurora provides unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility at 1/10th the cost of commercial databases. You can enjoy enhanced capabilities that delight your users, such as Amazon Aurora Serverless for scaling up to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second, price predictability with Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized, and analytics on your transactional data in near real time with zero-ETL integrations to Amazon Redshift.

2. Building generative AI applications:

You can improve your generative AI applications' performance with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL. With the combined power of Amazon Aurora Optimized Reads and pgvector_hnsw, you are able to achieve 20x improved queries per second as compared to pgvector_IVFFLAT.

3. Analytics and ML with zero-ETL integrations:

Zero-ETL integrations remove the heavy lifting of building and managing ETL pipelines from operational databases to data warehouses. With zero-ETL, customers can access their transactional data in near-real time to perform analytics and machine learning (ML) to drive desired business outcomes.

4. Deployment options:

Amazon RDS provides flexible deployment options. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom provides a managed experience for applications that require customization of the underlying operating system and database environment. With Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on AWS Outposts, you can deploy fully managed database instances in your on-premises environments.

Use cases

1. Build web and mobile applications:

Support growing apps with high availability, throughput, and storage scalability. Take advantage of flexible pay-per-use pricing to suit various application usage patterns.

2. Move to managed databases:

Innovate and build new apps with Amazon RDS instead of worrying about self-managing your databases, which can be time consuming, complex, and expensive.

3. Break free from legacy databases:

Free yourself from expensive, punitive, commercial databases by migrating to Aurora. When you migrate to Aurora, you get the scalability, performance, and availability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost.

Customers

1. Intuit Mint

Intuit Mint reduced database costs by 25% with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL

2. Cathay Pacific Airways

Cathay Pacific airways saw a 20% performance boost by migrating from on-premises Oracle to Amazon RDS

3. Samsung

Samsung migrated 1.1 billion users from Oracle to Aurora with AWS Database Migration Service (Amazon DMS)
Read the case study

Conclusion

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a powerful managed service by AWS that simplifies the setup, operation, and scaling of relational databases in the cloud. It supports multiple database engines and automates critical tasks, allowing developers to focus on building applications rather than managing databases. Amazon RDS offers benefits such as easy management, customizable performance, high availability and durability, security and compliance, high scalability, cost-effectiveness, and developer productivity. It integrates seamlessly with AI and ML services and provides flexible deployment options. Notable customers like Intuit Mint, Cathay Pacific Airways, and Samsung have successfully leveraged Amazon RDS to reduce costs and improve performance.