Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you to focus on your applications and business. Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL also enable you to create Read Replicas to scale out beyond the capacity of a single database deployment for read-heavy database workloads. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.

Amazon RDS DB Instances can be provisioned with either General Purpose (SSD), Provisioned IOPS (SSD) or standard (magnetic) storage. Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is a storage option designed to deliver fast, predictable, and consistent I/O performance, and is optimized for I/O-intensive, transactional (OLTP) database workloads.

Amazon RDS gives you access to several familiar database engines, including Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility, Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQL Server. This means that the code, applications, and tools you already use with your existing databases can be used with Amazon RDS.

Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period and enabling point-in-time recovery. You benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your Database Instance (DB Instance) via a single API call.