Amazon RDS vs Scylla | TrustRadius

Likelihood to Recommend

If you're operating within the Amazon universe of cloud computing, it's almost a no-brainer to utilize [Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)]. RDS is well suited for probably a majority of applications that are candidates to host on a cloud computing platform as it reduces overall management and complexity of your system.However, if you're doing a lot of data exporting/importing using tools that write to/read from the disk on the server, you may have challenges integrating RDS, as you have no access to the underlying host.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Marketing and Advertising Company, 11-50 employees

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Scylla is well suited for high-throughput scenarios where keyed data must be read or written with consistently low latency. It's less appropriate for use cases requiring relational queries, secondary indexes, or more structured data sets.

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Kirk Morales

CTO, Co-founder

PersosaComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Automatic software patching

Database scalability

Automated backups

Database security provisions

Monitoring and metrics

Automatic host deployment

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Performance

Availability

Concurrency

Data model flexibility

Pros

For engineers with experience managing databases, setup is simple. And for the uninitiated, the RDS console interface becomes intuitive with some practice.
Not having the maintain the underlying infrastructure is a great benefit of using RDS. Patching and backups can be scheduled from the console and from then on are pretty much automated.
Right-sizing the DB instance to perform optimally with an application can be a very simple procedure. If a DB instance is not struggling to keep up, the instance size can be scaled up with just a few clicks.
Baseline configurations are generally sane for most RDS instances. This allows novice developers and engineers to get the most out of the service without being a complete database administrator.

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Michael Jenkins

Senior Systems Reliability Engineer

The Walt Disney CompanyEntertainment, 10,001+ employees

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Low-latency reads
CQL has a familiar syntax
Parity with Cassandra
Practical features

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Kirk Morales

CTO, Co-founder

PersosaComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Cons

There should be a proper listing of all parameter groups alongside the instances that they are attached to. This would help to see which instances would be affected if a parameter group is changed.
RDS should allow SUPER privilege to the master user. A few advanced tasks(like getting a physical backup using MySQL Enterprise Backup) fail because SUPER privilege is not available for the master user.
A few parameters are not modifiable in the parameter groups and the access to the server filesystem is not given. This should not be the case because as an advanced user, you might want to understand things a little deeper.

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Alok Patwal

Software Developer

ezDIHealth, Wellness and Fitness, 201-500 employees

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Better documentation for best practices (e.g., how to effectively use connection pooling)

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Kirk Morales

CTO, Co-founder

PersosaComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Usability

Amazon RDS 8.7

Based on 5 answers

The vast majority of things you'd want to do in Amazon Relational Database Service are simple to accomplish and remarkably consistent across database engines. Pricing, scalability and monitoring are easy to configure. If I had one complaint, it's that database engine specific features are not well documented in AWS, requiring reading external documentation in order to use some database systems to the fullest. But for most use cases, the defaults available in AWS are simple, easy to use, and good enough.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 51-200 employees

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Scylla 8.2

Based on 1 answer

Very easy-to-understand syntax--uses CQL (same as Cassandra), which has many similarities to standard SQL. There are some gotchas, however, that must be known during schema development.

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Kirk Morales

CTO, Co-founder

PersosaComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Support Rating

Amazon RDS 8.9

Based on 25 answers

The product is fairly straight forward to use, and staff as well as knowledge base is pretty good for getting answers you may need. The product is a great, flexible alternative to adding to one's own in-house infrastructure. It's especially useful for environments that you aren't sure about the overall long term need. Amazon Relational Database Service is great for environments that once you determine the long term need, can be maintained by Amazon.

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Mike Narumiya

President, Principal

Klaxon IT SolutionsHospital & Health Care, 11-50 employees

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Scylla 9.1

Based on 1 answer

The Scylla cloud support team is incredibly responsive and proactive.

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Kirk Morales

CTO, Co-founder

PersosaComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Amazon Relational Database Service will probably give you everything you need from a traditional manual DB setup, except everything is managed for you. The only downside is having to pay the premium for the service; however, the trade-off of not having to deal with the intricacies involved with database administration, make it well worth it for most.

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Gabriel Samaroo

Senior Software Engineer

RocketripComputer Software, 11-50 employees

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Scylla has a quick learning curve (same as Cassandra) compared to other proprietary solutions like BigTable. It supports higher throughput and lower latency that other NoSQL databases like MongoDB, which sacrifice those features for more flexibility and unique features.

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Kirk Morales

CTO, Co-founder

PersosaComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Return on Investment

Switching back to RDS from Redshift has made my BI Dashboards much more performant (though again, we're not dealing with data in the magnitudes that justify the Redshift toolset).
It has decreased our tech debt. Engineering has been much more straight forward.
Our uptime has been improved by removing unnecessary data migration processes.

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Kyle Reichelt

Senior Project Manager

OnMetricInternet, 11-50 employees

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Addresses latency requirements of our platform

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Kirk Morales

CTO, Co-founder

PersosaComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

Optional

Free to try. Pay only for what you use with no minimum fee.

Amazon RDS Editions & Modules

Edition

Amazon RDS for MySQL	$0.29 ($0.58)¹
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL	$0.24 ($0.48)¹
Amazon RDS for MariaDB	$0.25 ($0.50)¹
Amazon RDS for Oracle	$0.482 ($0.964)¹
Amazon RDS for SQL Server	$1.02 ($1.52)¹

per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)

Additional Pricing Details

—

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Scylla Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—

Rating Summary

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Feature Rating Comparison

Automatic software patching

Database scalability

Automated backups

Database security provisions

Monitoring and metrics

Automatic host deployment

Performance

Availability

Concurrency

Data model flexibility

Pros

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Cons

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Usability

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Support Rating

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Alternatives Considered

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Return on Investment

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Screenshots

Amazon RDS

Scylla

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

Amazon RDS Editions & Modules

Edition

Additional Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

Scylla Editions & Modules

Additional Pricing Details

Rating Summary

Add comparison