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Amazon RDS

Amazon RDS

Overview

What is Amazon RDS?

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) from Amazon Web Services.

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Recent Reviews

Amazon RDS review

9 out of 10
October 09, 2023
Incentivized
RDS simplifies database management tasks like provisioning, patching, backup, recovery etc. This reduces the administrative burden and …
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Amazon RDS review

9 out of 10
October 07, 2023
Incentivized
In my organization we use Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for storing relational data which is used by our Internal teams for …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

$0.24 ($0.48)

Cloud
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)

Amazon RDS for MariaDB

$0.25 ($0.50)

Cloud
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)

Amazon RDS for MySQL

$0.29 ($0.58)

Cloud
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
    Optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/?trk…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details

What is Amazon RDS?

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) allows users to set up, operate, and scale a database in the cloud. The vendor states it provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, setup, patching, and backups. This frees users to focus on applications so they can give them the fast performance, high availability, security, and compatibility they need.

Amazon RDS is available on several database instance types - optimized for memory, performance or I/O - and provides you with six familiar database engines to choose from including Amazon Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server.

Amazon RDS Screenshots

Screenshot of A look inside the RDS console.

Amazon RDS Videos

What's new in Amazon RDS
Dive deep into RDS new features.

Amazon RDS Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesNAMER, APAC, LATAM, EMEA
Supported LanguagesEnglish, French, Korean, Chinese, Japanese

Frequently Asked Questions

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) from Amazon Web Services.

Oracle Database, Google Cloud SQL, and Microsoft SQL Server are common alternatives for Amazon RDS.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.6.

The most common users of Amazon RDS are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(281)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-2 of 2)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
KAUSHIK DEBNATH | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hi,
As you might be aware Amazon Relational database service aka RDS in short has a couple of sets of database. I have been involved for SQL server, Mysql databses on RDS. This has helped as it provides pay-as-you go pricing tier from AWS cloud. Since the customer needed a viable database solution to be hosted on the cloud environment for a short duration, so it was much suitable for the customer to have it
  • database solution
  • if it could provide with smaller instances or any lightweight version
  • sometimes the auto-scaling option becomes headache for support team making it
  • non accessible for users
well suited to host a database, if used for shorter duration.
Most suited for customer who do not want to bother about underlying hardware maintenance or OS-patching
  • positive outcome would be no OS patching
  • auto-scale up when faced load increase
we could use Azure SQL for our project but as our other parts of the solutions existed on AWS, it was a better choice to have AWS RDS or else traffic exiting AWS would have taken a lot of cloud changes.
Microsoft SQL Server requires license, either core-based or full license which can be purchased one time but, AWS RDS solution became cheaper in this scenario as our project work needed the database for shorter duration
  • Online Training
  • No Training
the online training & digital content available on the web from AWS was having sufficient information to deploy and run the service
the product does not require to know much or learn to get started. As the underlying hardware is maintained by the cloud provider, its very simple to choose the database and its version and storage and instance size and some minor details & we were good to proceed launching the product
Michael Jenkins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon RDS is our default solution for running databases in the cloud. RDS provides the data layer for our web applications that require data persistence. RDS is widely used by application development teams throughout the company. RDS allows us to rapidly deploy databases, operate them in a manner that is generally hands off, and with extended features like Amazon Aurora, take advantage of capabilities like automatic backups, multi-AZ read replicas, and simple failovers.
  • 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.
  • Experienced DBAs may find RDS limiting in some areas. There is no direct access to the underlying servers so OS level tweaks may be out of bounds.
  • Getting logs from a database can be a challenge. Other services may need to be turned on (CloudWatch, for example) to get access logging, etc.
  • While rudimentary logging is included with RDS, users must pay a premium to get more in depth logs (in particular, fine grained logging in terms of events per minute). This is not a bad thing, since you get what you pay for, but some users find it annoying to have to pay extra for metrics with higher fidelity.
RDS is well suited for application environments where the developers don't have time to worry about the database. If the application requires a DB that is "fire and forget," RDS can be a rock solid implementation. This is particularly true for teams that may not have DBA resources or don't have a team member with extensive database admin skills. With some basic understanding, teams can stand up a DB in RDS and move on to the task of developing and maintaining the applications that use the DB.

RDS may be less appropriate for high performance applications where every level of the systems needs to be finely tuned. On the one hand, a novice developer may be able to get the required performance by scaling up to a large instance size while a proficient DBA could get the same performance from a finely tuned database running on an EC2 instance where access to the OS is available.

Pricing might also be a factor against RDS for teams that have limited budgets. Again, higher performing DB instances might be priced slightly more than the same DB running on a stand-alone server.

  • RDS has increased the stability of our applications and the dependability of the database layer in the complete system. In most cases when something is wrong with the app, we know it won't be the database.
  • Using the automatic backup and failover capabilities of Aurora RDS, we have more effective high availability and disaster recovery options.
In this response, I'm specifically comparing RDS to running a database on an EC2 server. With EC2, the team owns all of the administrative and operational responsibilities. Patching the operating system patching and database software become another task that developers or system admins have to take on. Running a DB on EC2 does have the benefit of having more access to the server and DB configurations, but the benefit of being able to tweak a DB for a few more milliseconds of performance is usually not worth the effort for most applications.

On the other hand, RDS is a completely managed service. What is lost in access to the database server is gained in dependability and simplified operation.
I have only had good experiences in working with AWS support. I will admit that my experience comes from the benefit of having a premium tier of support but even working with free-tier accounts I have not had problems getting help with AWS products when needed. And most often, the docs do a pretty good job of explaining how to operate a service so a quick spin through the docs has been useful in solving problems.
  • Online training
  • in-person training
  • no training
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