RDS to the rescue. Let You're DBAs be DBAs, rather than Server Administrators
August 30, 2018
RDS to the rescue. Let You're DBAs be DBAs, rather than Server Administrators
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Relational Database Service
Our company has a cloud-first and AWS first strategy that includes creating and moving databases to the public cloud. We started this journey seriously about 2 years ago and have decided to use RDS services as often as possible, instead of using EC2 instances for our database environments. While our footprint in the public cloud is still a small part of our overall compute, we are finding that RDS is meeting our database needs are we are migrating and creating new ones. RDS is not only solving issues for the operations of our business, we are also using RDS as part of our overall data lake strategy.
- Getting the data in and out of our databases, especially with the close integration RDS has with S3 buckets.
- Less overall management of the database servers. Our DBAs are now do more DBA work than server admin work, which moves them higher on the value chain.
- Performance and Scalability.
- Some of the RDS (like Redshift) still lack a SQL programming language like t-SQL, but are getting better all the time.
- Depending on the database chosen, pricing is still dictated by the vendor like Oracle or SQL-server.
- For problem deep in the system, not having machine access can be problematic.
- Positive - Move to Redshift from Oracle could save us up to 50% annually on database licensing
- Positive - Move to Aurora is helping us save on on premise support we pay for mySQL
- Negative - still, hard to find a true cost of ownership until several months of use under you're belt
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Running our database on RDS has been a good option as we originally thought most of our database would be running on EC2 instances and they we needed root access to the machine. We found out that wasn't the case and just needed to change our mindset.