There are many managed databases provided by AWS which allows us to setup databases very easily.
Why use managed databases given by AWS
You can setup your own Db on your on premises server or on your Ec2 instances but then you have to take care of backups, replication, scaling, availability, durability. Which is a lot of operational work added to your plate. If you mainly want to focus on developing your applications and don't want to worry about managing and handling your data bases then managed DB's by AWS are your best choice. These managed DB have a built in
- Scaling, Availability
- Backups and upgrades
- Monitoring, alarms etc.
Relational DB services
RDS
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It allows you to setup many relational DB with many different engines like Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server.
Using RDS has the following advantages over traditional Db
- Ease of setup - You can setup a production-ready relational database in minutes
- Scaling - These Db has built in scaling you can also setup replicas to reduce load on each server
- Availability - If you setup a multi-az db then all the data is automatically replicated and we can even recover our DB from there. There are also continuous backups and we can recover DB's from those timestamps
- Secure - It allows you to encrypt your data using industry standard encrypted IPsec VPN. It also offers encryption at rest and encryption in transit.
- Maintenance - We have to do less management as OS management and updates are handled by AWS
Aurora
Aurora is a special proprietary DB by AWS and you can use Mysql or Postgres it combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. It auto-scales up to 128TB per database instance and delivers high performance and availability with continuous backup to Amazon S3.
Next we will do a Hands on setting up RDS on AWS cloud.