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Rock solid cloud database hosting.
December 01, 2017

Rock solid cloud database hosting.

Justin Schroeder | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

We use amazon RDS to offload database systems from the primary server stack. This is particularly useful for us in 2 scenarios:

1. You are running server clusters and the database needs to be external to those clusters for consistency.
2. You are operating some shared services and need to sandbox a particular set of data or application.
  • It's quite easy to set up and provision new RDS instances.
  • Setting up multi-zone failover tolerant databases is literally just a couple mouse clicks.
  • Databases are automatically backed up and have minor version upgrades applied.
  • Set and forget.
  • We have at times dealt with a few latency issues between RDS and our server instances even when they are in the same zone. This isn't a big deal if you're appropriately caching, but if you were to run a CMS, say Drupal, without caching on RDS from an EC2 instance it could be quite a bit slower than using a single box.
  • Occasionally Amazon will depreciate a particular version and you are forced to "do some work" to migrate your database in a time period you may not have anticipated. Not sure there is any way around this for anybody, but it's a thing to think about.
  • Much less time spent managing database versions, restores, cloning and uptime.
  • Allows us to create server clusters which can push our business goals.
  • Allows us to push the envelope of what's possible in our backend systems.
Honestly, there aren't a lot of great alternatives to RDS, and most likely the real alternative is just running an instance on your local box. While lots of other services (like Rackspace) offer hosted database solutions, RDS in my opinion, is the clear winner on price, availability, and failover support.
Reach for amazon RDS if you're looking to offload your database to an dedicated server. This is really important for just about any database-backed system that relies on multiple server instances. If you can afford it, it's also a good solution for simply running a database instead of co-locating one on your application server because it takes so much of the guesswork out of management.