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RDS: Secure, scalable, and universally trusted
September 11, 2017

RDS: Secure, scalable, and universally trusted

Corwin Cole | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Relational Database Service

Amazon RDS holds and manages data for our core operations. We accept somewhat sensitive data: PII, but nothing PCI-protected. The well-vetted security of the service, along with its outstanding configurability, make it a perfect option for maintaining trust with our clients. RDS easily upgrades when we need to scale and was seemingly built with the expectation that it would fit neatly into an event-driven architecture. Automatic backups, read replication, everything is exceptional. I'm trying to think of a complaint or drawback, but I can't.
  • RDS received provisional FedRAMP-High Authorization in January of 2017. When our clients ask us how our data is encrypted and secured, we mention that it's encrypted at rest on Amazon RDS, and that (so far) has instantly established trust in every instance.
  • RDS makes everything easy - automatic backups, encryption at rest (above a certain service tier), ultra-fast upgrades, and excellent configurations for event hooks and logging.
  • RDS is impressively fast and available. Our RDS instance literally has never had a failure or problem of any kind.
  • It's really hard to think of any areas for improvement. I think the console could maybe use a simpler interface or walkthrough for newer users who know what they want, but are unfamiliar with the technical terminology.
  • It would be great to be able to automatically spawn a lower-tier RDS instance for staging and development environments, mirroring the functionality of the higher-tier production environment but minimizing costs.
  • Because DynamoDB is not encrypted at rest (yet), it would be really nice to see more documentation about creating simple, semi-serverless applications with an RDS-Lambda-API Gateway setup.
  • Using AWS in general, and especially RDS, has made it extremely easy to gain the trust of enterprise-level clients who have significant security and privacy concerns.
  • The scalability and rapid upgrade process of RDS has freed my business from a lot of growing pains.
  • Thanks in part to RDS, our hosting costs account for under 1% of operating costs.
RDS is outstanding for sensitive data, e.g. user credentials and PII, because you can get excellent encryption at rest and security features for relatively little expense. For simple data structures and relationships, I highly recommend RDS. For more complex and intricately interrelated structures, DynamoDB is probably a better offering, but its lack of at-rest encryption makes it inappropriate for credentials, PII, etc.

RDS also integrates extremely well with ElasticBeanstalk, Lambda, and so on, and has functionality to trigger and/or respond to events from other AWS services, such as SQS.