Amazon Databases

Amazon is a tech-giant which has it's hands into a lot of things… most prominent ones to the eyes of regular customers are that they are just an E-Commerce and Logistics company, but it is AWS (Amazon Web Services) that has been the backbone of the company for quite a few years now.

AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security and enterprise applications. These services help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale.

One of the most important and crucial one is the Database service… or Amazon RDS as we call it.

What is Amazon RDS?

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is as they say it ” is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the AWS Cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks. ”

Amazon Relational Database Service (or Amazon RDS) is a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services (AWS). RDS is designed as a web service running “in the cloud” designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications for the clients who use it.

Amazon RDS facilitates the deployment and maintenance of relational databases in the cloud. A cloud administrator uses Amazon RDS to set up, operate, manage and scale a relational instance of a cloud database. Amazon RDS is not itself a database; it is a service used to manage relational databases.

How does RDS work?

Databases are used to store large quantities of data that applications can draw on to help them perform various functions. A relational database uses tables to store data. It is called relational because it organizes data points with defined relationships.

Administrators control Amazon RDS with the AWS Management Console, Amazon RDS API calls or the AWS Command Line Interface. They use these interfaces to deploy database instances to which users can apply specific settings.

Amazon RDS is built upon the AWS EC2 platform. Essentially an Amazon RDS instance runs inside of a virtual machine on EC2. That brings all of the benefits of EC2 as well. (EC2 is a part of AWS that allows clients to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications.)

Amazon provides several instance types with different combinations of resources, such as CPU, memory, storage options and networking capacity. Each type comes in a variety of sizes to suit the needs of different workloads.

RDS users can use AWS Identity and Access Management to define and set permissions for who can access an RDS database.

Amazon RDS features

Amazon RDS features include the following:

Replication. RDS uses the replication feature to create read replicas. These are read-only copies of database instances that applications use without altering the original production database. Administrators can also enable automatic failover across multiple availability zones through RDS Multi-AZ deployment and with synchronous data replication.

Storage. RDS provides three types of storage:

·        General-purpose solid-state drive (SSD). Amazon recommends this storage as the default choice.

·        Provisioned input-output operations per second (IOPS). SSD storage for I/O-intensive workloads.

·        Magnetic. A lower cost option.

Monitoring. The Amazon CloudWatch service enables managed monitoring. It lets users view capacity and I/O metrics.

Patching. RDS provides patches for whichever database engine the user chooses.

Backups. Another feature is failure detection and recovery. RDS provides managed instance backups with transaction logs to enable point-in-time recovery. Users pick a retention period and restore databases to any time during that period. They also can manually take snapshots of instances that remain until they are manually deleted.

Incremental billing. Users pay a monthly fee for the instances they launch.

Encryption. RDS uses public key encryption to secure automated backups, read replicas, data snapshots and other data stored at rest.

What are the benefits and drawbacks of Amazon RDS?

There are several pros and cons to using Amazon RDS.

Benefits

The main benefit of Amazon RDS is that it helps organizations deal with the complexity of managing large relational databases. Other benefits include the following:

·        Ease of use. Admins don’t need to learn specific database management tools. They also can manage multiple database instances using the management console. RDS is compatible with database engines that users may already be familiar with, such as MySQL and Oracle And it automates manual backup and recovery processes.

·        Cost-effectiveness. According to AWS, customers only pay for what they use. Also, the time spent maintaining instances is reduced, because maintenance tasks, such as backups and patching, are automated.

·        The use of read replicas routes read-heavy traffic away from the main database instance, reducing the workload on that one instance.

·        RDS splits up compute and storage so admins can scale them independently.

Drawbacks

Some downsides of using Amazon RDS include the following:

·        Lack of root access. Because it is a managed service, users do not have root access to the server running RDS. RDS restricts access for certain procedures to those with advanced privileges.

·        Downtime. Systems must go offline for some patching and scaling procedures. The timing on these processes varies. With scaling, compute resources need a few minutes downtime on average.

Amazon RDS database engines

An AWS customer can spin up six types of database engines within Amazon RDS:

1.    Amazon Aurora is a proprietary AWS relational database engine. Amazon Aurora is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL.

2.   RDS for MariaDB is compatible with MariaDB, an open source relational database management system (RDBMS) that’s an offshoot of MySQL.

3.   RDS for MySQL is compatible with the MySQL open source RDBMS.

4.   RDS for Oracle Database is compatible with several editions of Oracle Database, including bring-your-own-license and license-included versions.

5.    RDS for PostgreSQL is compatible with PostgreSQL open source object-RDBMS.

6.   RDS for SQL Server is compatible with Microsoft SQL Server, an RDBMS.

Amazon RDS adds support for major and minor versions of database engines over time. It is designed to allow admins to specify an engine version when they create a database instance. In most cases, Amazon RDS can support developer code, applications and tools that are already in use with existing databases.

AWS provides other database services, including the following:

·        Amazon DynamoDB key-value and document database for NoSQL databases;

·        Amazon Neptune for graph databases; and

·        AWS Database Migration Service to ease database transfers and transformations.

Amazon RDS use cases

Amazon RDS’ scalability, security and availability make it useful for a variety of applications. Some possible uses include the following:

Online retailing. These applications manage complex databases that track inventories, transactions and pricing.

Mobile and online gaming. RDS supports developers that need to continuously update these applications and users who need high availability.

Travel applications. Applications like Airbnb take advantage of RDS’ ability to simplify time-consuming database administration tasks and automate database replication. Mobile apps like Airbnb also take advantage of RDS’ scalable storage capability.

Streaming applications. Applications like Netflix take advantage of RDS’ storage scalability as well, and availability of Amazon RDS, which allows them to handle high demand daily.

Finance applications. These applications, like other mobile applications, can use RDS to simplify administrative database tasks and save time and money.

Business-to-business reporting company Enlyft said 6,096 companies were using Amazon RDS in 2021, including The American Red Cross, Penguin Random House and Zendesk. Amazon also reported in 2021 that Airbnb, Intuit and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs are among the organizations that use RDS to support their data workloads.

Conclusion on Amazon Databases

Amazon RDS helps organizations handle relational database management tasks such as migration, backup, recovery and patching. Some of the main features of Amazon RDS are replication, high performance storage and failure detection.

One of the biggest advantages of Amazon RDS is its ease of use. It lets administrators manage multiple database instances without having to learn other database management tools.

These features enable RDS to help organizations cut costs that come from time-consuming database administration tasks and manage the hidden costs that come with using high-performance storage in AWS.