Amazon Relational Database Service (or Amazon RDS) is a distributed

relational database A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relati ...

service by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is a web service running "in the cloud" designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications. Administration processes like patching the database software, backing up databases and enabling point-in-time recovery are managed automatically. Scaling storage and compute resources can be performed by a single API call to the AWS control plane on-demand. AWS does not offer an SSH connection to the underlying virtual machine as part of the managed service.

Timeline

Amazon RDS was first released on 22 October 2009, supporting

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

databases. This was followed by support for

Oracle Database Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. It is a database commonly used for running online ...

in June 2011,

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which ...

in May 2012,

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the ...

in November 2013, and MariaDB (a fork of MySQL) in October 2015, and an additional 80 features during 2017. In November 2014 AWS announced Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database offering enhanced high availability and performance, and in October 2017 a PostgreSQL-compatible database offering was launched. In March 2019 AWS announced support of PostgreSQL 11 in RDS, five months after official release.

Features

New database instances can be launched from the

AWS Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide d ...

Management Console or using the Amazon RDS APIs. Amazon RDS offers different features to support different use cases. Some of the major features are:

Multi-Availability Zone (AZ) deployment

In May 2010 Amazon announced Multi-Availability Zone deployment support. Amazon RDS Multi-Availability Zone (AZ) allows users to automatically provision and maintain a synchronous physical or logical "standby" replica, depending on database engine, in a different Availability Zone (independent infrastructure in a physically separate location). Multi-AZ database instance can be developed at creation time or modified to run as a Multi-AZ deployment later. Multi-AZ deployments aim to provide enhanced availability and data durability for MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL and SQL Server instances and are targeted for production environments. In the event of planned database maintenance or unplanned service disruption, Amazon RDS automatically fails over to the up-to-date standby, allowing database operations to resume without administrative intervention. Multi-AZ RDS instances are optional and have a cost associated with them. When creating a RDS instance, the user is asked if they would like to use a Multi-AZ RDS instance. In Multi-AZ RDS deployments backups are done in the standby instance so I/O activity is not suspended any time but users may experience elevated latencies for a few minutes during backups.

Read replicas

Read replicas allow different use cases such as to scale in for read-heavy database workloads. There are up to five replicas available for MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL. Instances use the native,

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replication functionality of their respective database engines. They have no backups configured by default and are accessible and can be used for read scaling. MySQL and MariaDB read replicas can be made writeable again since October 2012; PostgreSQL read replicas do not support it. Replicas are done at database instance level and do not support replication at database or table level.

Performance metrics and monitoring

Performance metrics A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it en ...

for Amazon RDS are available from the AWS Management Console or the

Amazon CloudWatch Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of ...

API. In December 2015, Amazon announced an optional enhanced monitoring feature that provides an expanded set of metrics for the MySQL, MariaDB, and Aurora database engines.

RDS costs

Amazon RDS instances are priced very similarly to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). RDS is charged per hour and comes in two packages: On-Demand DB Instances and Reserved DB Instances. On-Demand Instances are at an ongoing hourly usage rate. Reserved DB Instances require an up-front, one-time fee and in turn provide a discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance. Apart from the hourly cost of running the RDS instance, users are charged for the amount of storage provisioned, data transfers and input and output operations performed. AWS have introduced Provisioned Input and Output Operations, in which the user can define how many IO per second are required by their application. IOPS can contribute significantly to the total cost of running the RDS instance. As part of the AWS Free Tier, the Amazon RDS Free Tier helps new AWS customers get started with a managed database service in the cloud for free. You can use the Amazon RDS Free Tier to develop new applications, test existing applications, or simply gain hands-on experience with Amazon RDS.

Automatic backups

Amazon RDS creates and saves automated

backup In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "back up", ...

s of RDS DB instances. The first snapshot of a DB instance contains the data for the full DB instance and subsequent snapshots are incremental, maximum retention period is 35 days. In Multi-AZ RDS deployments backups are done in the standby instance so I/O activity is not suspended for any amount of time but you may experience elevated latencies for a few minutes during backups.

Operation

Database instances can be managed from the

Management Console, using the Amazon RDS APIs and using

AWS CLI Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide ...

. Since 1 June 2017, you can stop AWS RDS instances from AWS Management Console or AWS CLI for 7 days at a time. After 7 days, it will be automatically started, and since September 2018 RDS instances can be protected from accidental deletion. Increase DB space is supported, but not decrease allocated space. Additionally there is at least a six-hour period where new allocation cannot be done.

Database instance types

As of August 2020, Amazon RDS supports 82 DB instance types - to support different types of workloads: * General Purpose: 31 instances * Memory Optimized: 33 instances * Previous Generation: 18 instances

General purpose

Memory optimized

Previous generation

References

External links

Amazon Relational Database Service
- official homepage * {{DEFAULTSORT:Amazon Rds Cloud databases RDS 2009 software