What is Amazon RDS? A guide for AWS beginners

Imagine you’re running an online electronics store. To offer users a personalized experience and display the right information, you use a database engine—let’s call it X. But as your store grows and more users visit it—X becomes unreliable. Your visitors can’t find the information they need, lags happen more often than you’d like to admit, and frequent downtime takes a toll on your revenue. You’re desperate to find another solution and allow your business to grow without restraints.

This is where Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) comes in. Its powerful options support your business in the best way possible by automating some of the database management tasks. But what is Amazon RDS exactly, and how can you benefit from it? In this guide, we’ll offer a detailed overview of AWS RDS and discuss its advantages, features, and use cases. 

We’ll also introduce you to Miro and how you can use it to create effective diagrams to visualize your entire AWS architecture and see how Amazon RDS fits into it.

What is AWS RDS?

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed database product within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem. One of its biggest benefits is its ease of use. 

Unlike traditional relational databases that often require complex and time-consuming self-management, AWS RDS simplifies many routine tasks through self-automation. It allows for quick setup of a reliable database while offering flexibility through a range of engine choices and deployment options.

What is Amazon RDS database?

An Amazon RDS database is a type of database that organizes your data into rows and columns that together form tables. All data points in such a database are connected to each other. Amazon RDS databases are used across industries, from finance to ecommerce, and they simplify handling and manipulating vast amounts of data, especially with complex websites and apps.

Database instances in Amazon RDS come preconfigured, which simplifies their launch. All you need to do is pick an instance and customize it (if you want), so you don’t have to build instances from scratch.

What is Amazon RDS used for? Here are some of its most popular use cases:

• Building web and mobile applications: With AWS RDS, you can build apps that can grow without constraints and handle frequent fluctuations in demand.

• Ensuring compliance: AWS RDS offers robust data security and privacy options, such as encryption, so you can meet the strictest compliance requirements.

• Backing up data: As AWS RDS automatically backs up your data, it can help you keep your app functioning even if something goes wrong.

• Stress-free database management: With AWS, you automate database management tasks so that you can spend your valuable time on more impactful activities.

What are the advantages of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)?

Here are the key benefits of Amazon RDS:

Easy management

Amazon RDS was designed with one goal—streamlining database management as much as possible.

How exactly does Amazon RDS simplify database management? Here are the answers:

• Lowering your administrative burden: Amazon RDS takes over tasks such as software patching, provisioning, and backing up. Instead of dealing with administration, you can focus on building and scaling high-performing apps.

• Providing enhanced monitoring: The product enables enhanced monitoring, giving you insight into 50+ metrics related to your database’s health so that you can easily spot inefficiencies and understand how to fix them. To detect performance problems, you can rely on Amazon RDS Performance Insights, and for key operational metrics, you can use the Amazon RDS Console.

• Simplifying deployment: Amazon RDS database instances come preconfigured, so you can launch one and connect it to your app within minutes. Of course, Amazon RDS allows you to customize your instances according to your needs.

• Offering best practice recommendations: Amazon RDS constantly analyzes configuration and usage metrics from your database instances. Depending on the results, it may recommend improvements regarding your database engine versions, storage, networking, or instance types. You can see these recommendations at all times and choose whether to perform a specific action immediately, schedule it for a later time, or ignore it.

Numerous engine options

Amazon RDS allows you to choose from not two, not three, but eight engine options. “Engines” are core software components that power database systems. Here are the engines RDS supports:

1. Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition

2. Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition

3. RDS for PostgreSQL

4. RDS for MySQL

5. RDS for MariaDB

6. RDS for SQL Server

7. RDS for Db2

8. RDS for Oracle

All these options offer features such as:

• Automatic software patching: Amazon RDS will periodically update your resources, including your hardware, underlying operating system, and database engine version, to keep your system reliable and secure.

• Scaling infrastructure with CloudFormation: With AWS CloudFormation (an AWS service that lets you model and manage infrastructure resources), you can automate resource management and grow your database while saving time and effort.

• Amazon RDS Console: The Console allows you to easily manage and monitor your databases. It is a convenient feature that gives you a detailed overview of all your database instances.

But, the engines also differ in their features. For example, you get the option to clone your database (create a full virtual copy of it for testing purposes) only with Aurora engines.

Here are a few reasons why having a wide range of database engine options works in your favor:

Flexibility

With Amazon RDS, you can choose whatever engine suits your needs to the letter. This is especially convenient if you’re already familiar with and would like to use a particular database engine.

Simpler migration to the cloud

If you’re already using a specific database engine, you can effortlessly move to the cloud without extensive code changes.

Amazon RDS features

Amazon RDS comes packed with features, and covering them all would take ages. So, let’s dive into the key ones you need to know about: 

Customizable performance

Your database’s performance (how quickly it can access, read, and write data) depends on where you choose to keep your data. Some storage options are good enough for apps and websites that don’t require high speeds or don’t handle a lot of traffic. Other storage options are much more capable and allow databases to easily handle traffic fluctuations or prioritize speed.

With Amazon RDS, you can choose between two storage types depending on your needs:

1. General Purpose storage: This type of storage will work fine for “normal” use cases. It’s ideal for websites and apps that don’t need extraordinary write/read speeds and don’t experience heavy loads.

2. Provisioned IOPS storage: If speed, reliability, consistency, and impressive performance are what you’re after, this is the storage type for you. It can give your database the power to quickly handle a bunch of requests without delays or lags. This makes it perfect for websites with massive databases (think ecommerce stores or banking platforms) that depend on consistent performance and speed.

Automated backups

Data protection is one of your top priorities—you want to make sure that you can restore your data if something goes south. Amazon RDS gives you peace of mind with its automated backups by default.

Here are the backup options you get with Amazon RDS:

Automated backups: Amazon RDS conducts automated backups of your databases and transaction logs once a day during a 30-minute backup window. Point-in-time restores: If something goes wrong with your database, you can restore it to a previous version and “erase” the issue. Point-in-time restores are available during the backup retention period (you set it yourself and can choose between 0 and 35 days). Database snapshots: You can take a snapshot of a database instance whenever you want. The snapshots are kept in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) until you decide to delete them. Snapshot copies: You can copy database snapshots, both manual and automated. Snapshot sharing: You can share your snapshots with other AWS accounts.

Encryption at rest and in transit

Protecting the data in your database is crucial for:

• Keeping your and your customers’ info safe

• Preventing breaches, unauthorized access, and cyber attacks

• Complying with relevant security regulations

Amazon RDS allows you to protect your data through encryption. This option is available for both data at rest and data in transit. 

Data at rest is the data stored in your system that isn’t currently moving from one point to another. Data in transit is the data moving from one location to another. For example, in an ecommerce website, data at rest would be your previous transactions, and data in transit would be the customer’s payment info once they place an order.

You can create and control keys for encryption through the AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).

Multi-AZ deployment

Amazon RDS supports multi-AZ deployments to enable minimal downtime. Let’s clarify this:

• “Multi-AZ” stands for “multiple Availability Zones.” Availability Zones are data centers within the AWS Global Infrastructure.

• “Multi-AZ deployments” mean that Amazon RDS automatically creates a primary database instance and copies it to an instance in a different AZ (the standby database). If the primary database experiences issues, the standby one takes over and functions as the main database.

The failover (switching from the primary to a standby database) usually takes less than 35 seconds and requires no intervention on your end. Thanks to multi-AZ deployments, Amazon RDS offers a 99.95% uptime according to its Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Amazon RDS Proxy

If you’re looking to enhance the efficiency of your database and improve the scalability, security, and resilience of your apps, Amazon RDS Proxy can be an excellent solution.

So, what is Amazon RDS Proxy? Many apps typically open numerous connections to database servers to perform write and read operations. For example, your ecommerce app will connect to the database whenever someone places an order.

Constantly opening and closing these connections can exhaust your database, affect its performance, and consequently slow down your app. This is where Amazon RDS Proxy comes in—it allows your apps to pool and share existing connections with the database instead of creating a new one each time.

If your primary database fails and a standby one must replace it, Amazon RDS Proxy will automatically switch to the new instance and preserve all connections.

Sketch out your cloud setup with Miro

Relational databases are the backbone of many apps and websites—they make the data secure and easily accessible. Plus, they simplify data management and manipulation and contribute to your apps’ high performance and stability.

Amazon RDS is an excellent choice when it comes to relational databases. But keep in mind that it’s only a tiny piece of your AWS cloud architecture puzzle. 

Handling dozens of resources and services that comprise your cloud architecture can easily get chaotic if you don’t understand how different components interact with each other. A lack of a clear “big picture” can lead to inefficiencies and issues, ultimately resulting in confusion among team members, decreased app performance, and higher costs.

A smart way to avoid these unfortunate scenarios is to create a diagram of your cloud architecture. To do that properly, you’ll want a quality diagramming tool that makes mapping out your AWS architecture easy and quick—like Miro.

Miro is an Innovation Workspace with an impressive set of AWS architecture diagramming options. Our key features include:

• AWS Cloud View app: A handy tool that lets you generate AWS infrastructure diagrams by importing data directly from your AWS account. Use it to visualize your resources and right-size them according to your needs.

• AWS shape pack: Take advantage of our extensive library of standardized AWS shapes to bring your AWS cloud architecture components to life. Visualize and optimize your cloud setup by simply dragging and dropping the desired shapes across your Miro board.

• 13+ AWS diagramming templates: We recommend starting off with our AWS Architecture Diagramming Template, which lets you plan, design, and audit your cloud architecture effortlessly.

• Diagram Focus Mode: Customize your diagrams to fit your project and workload needs with handy tools like curated toolbars, layers, and easy alignment and distribution updates.

• AWS Cost Calculator: Clearly estimate your cloud architecture costs and spot cost-optimization opportunities right on your Miro board.

• Security and compliance: Keep your AWS setup secure with features like user access control and normalized audit logs.

• Real-time and async collaboration: Work with your team on designing your AWS cloud architecture using interactive presentations, live workshops, and async Talktracks.

Ready to visualize every component of your architecture and enjoy unmatched clarity? Sign up for Miro’s free Business trial and explore our AWS features.

If you’re still wondering how Miro can help you, check out how ClickHouse leveraged our options to boost team collaboration and streamline the design process.