Overview of RDS
AWS RDS is a managed database service. What this means is that AWS offers a wrapper around a relational database that manages many of the functions that are normally carried out by a DBA. For example, RDS can take backups by default without the DBA needing to schedule them. RDS aims to reduce the amount of time a DBA spends doing day-to-day administration work, allowing them to focus on areas such as performance tuning.
To use RDS, you need to consider four things:
- Which database type do I want?
- How much compute (CPU and memory) do I need?
- How much storage do I need?
- Do I need to consider high availability or disaster recovery options?
With that information and the VPC that we built in Chapter 3, Understanding AWS Infrastructure, you can deploy an RDS that's ready to store the data for your application.
To be able to decide on these four questions, first, let's look at what databases RDS supports.
