Best SaaS solution in market
September 05, 2017
Best SaaS solution in market
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Relational Database Service
As a part of the shift in the organization from moving away from Oracle to open-source systems, we started developing micro services. The micro service architecture emphasizes on small sized databases and APIs that control access to the data. So in the pre-micro service era where we have one monolith DB that's managed by Infrastructure teams, the new architecture demands new DBs. Traditionally speaking, spawning new robust and production ready databases used to be difficult. For developers, it involves procurement of hardware, connecting it to the network, installing new DB software, setting up robust backup scripts for the data; which is a lot of work. Amazon RDS offers SaaS to replace the above work, making it super easy for a developer to spawn a new instance by filling up a short form and clicking a button.
- Making it super easy to spin up new instances. It's as simple as filling up a form and clicking a button.
- RDS offers a catalog of popular databases to choose from. This provides options for companies that have code that's strongly coupled with a database and for developers to try new databases to solve a problem.
- RDS takes care of creating backup scripts and multi zoning your data for making the database robust.
- RDS ties really well into the rest of Amazon's security model, making the data secure.
- Currently RDS does not offer a No-SQL DB management through RDS. They have their DynamoDB offering for No-SQL, but I wish RDS offers popular No-SQL DB's like MongoDB in their offerings.
- RDS does not provide access to the Virtual Machine. It provides access to the database instance but not to the VM that Database resides in. This is kind of a nice to have as it would allow for fine grained performance tuning of the DB.
- Unifying RDS security by combining instance security model with AWS IAM model. Currently to manage an RDS instance you have to have two security models in place, one, to secure access to RDS through IAM and the other to secure access to the Database through the Database's own security.
- A very positive ROI, since RDS effectively replaces the wasteful Infrastructure teams for small scaled organizations. Since, with RDS you pay for what you use, its a lot more efficient than paying rent and maintaining data centers for the resources you might not always need.
- The side effect of moving to RDS is allocating budgets. In Pre-SaaS era, its very difficult to answer the question, how much does a project needs to pay for infrastructure, but with moving to RDS, we could allocate cost centers allocated for the project to each instance and we could get fine-grained cost allocations.
- Docker
Though you could get similar functionality using Docker, Amazon RDS offers a more comprehensive SaaS solution.
With Docker, you still need to have an EC2 instance to install the Docker and manage backup scripts using EC2 snapshots or S3. But RDS provides that solution out-of-box.
The advantage with Docker is the access to the VM. It allows for fine-tuning of the database unlike RDS.
Overall, if the database is not provided as RDS solution, Docker would be my backup solution.
With Docker, you still need to have an EC2 instance to install the Docker and manage backup scripts using EC2 snapshots or S3. But RDS provides that solution out-of-box.
The advantage with Docker is the access to the VM. It allows for fine-tuning of the database unlike RDS.
Overall, if the database is not provided as RDS solution, Docker would be my backup solution.