Taking automatic backups, RDS snapshots, and restore and read replicas

In this section, you will see how RDS automatic backups and manual snapshots work. These features come with Amazon RDS.

Let’s consider a database that is scheduled to take a backup at 5 A.M. every day. If the application fails at 11 A.M., then it is possible to restart the application from the backup taken at 11 A.M. with the loss of 6 hours’ worth of data. This is called a 6-hour Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The RPO is defined as the time between the most recent backup and the incident, and this determines the amount of data loss. If you want to reduce this, then you have to schedule more incremental backups, which increases the cost and backup frequency. If your business demands a lower RPO value, then the business must spend more to provide the necessary technical solutions.

Now, according to our example, an engineer was assigned the task of bringing the system back online as soon as the...