RDS

Introduction

The Amazon Relational Database Service offers an easy to use solution for setting up database servers. It takes away the pain of having to install an operating system, the desired database system and configuring everything.

Especially for systems that need "High Availability" and "Scaling" things become much easier when using RDS.

RDS can provide servers with the following RDBMS:

• Amazon Aurora
• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• MariaDB
• Oracle
• Microsoft SQL Server

In addition to that there are several server types available, which are optimized for different purposes. More information about that can be found here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-technical-content/latest/cost-optimization-right-sizing/overview-amazon-ec2-amazon-rds.html.

How to use RDS

Basically RDS is just an easy way to get an EC2 instance that has the RDBMS of choice pre-installed. After you create a new instance in the AWS console it ready to be used.

It's recommended to create the RDS instance in the same VPC as the instances that will need to connect to it. Doing so allows the connection to go over the internal IP and external connections can be blocked. This isolates the database from the rest of the internet and thus provides better security.

For more information, please see here: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/getting-started/.

Pricing

Prices can be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/.

However it is highly recommended to calculate the price using the calculator here: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#s=RDS.

Using the calculator it's very easy to provide a cost estimation of all the services that are required for a new system.