RDS: a growing solution for your everyday database needs
February 27, 2019
RDS: a growing solution for your everyday database needs
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Relational Database Service
Amazon RDS is a great service for managing all of your relational database services in a simple manner. In our shift to data analytics and a cloud infrastructure for our applications, RDS was invaluable in providing consistent backend support for all of our applications, both small and large. Its ability to quickly hook up to any existing AWS infrastructure and replicate itself across multiple AZs meant that we could quickly adjust the availability and cost efficiency of an application's database as it scaled.
- Scalable to infinity. If you want scalable infrastructure, RDS will provide it for you in droves. You automatically launch across multiple AZs to ensure failover solutions, and can choose to launch additional read replicas or database snapshots to ensure snappy reads and data availability.
- Allows you to focus on the application instead of managing a database. While this leads to tradeoffs in your control of the database, it allows a reduced DB management team and can ensure an application can get off the ground as soon as possible.
- You do have a lack of control when it comes to the minutiae of database management. Replication topology, SUPER privilege, direct access to data directories and logs are all restricted with RDS making it harder for the experienced RDS sysadmin to run their system.
- Availability reduced in some ways to make other options easier. The only feasible method is multi-AZ deployment for replication and planned downtime makes it hard to keep a running application at times
- Lack of access to the professional tools of RDS systems means that you have reduced insight into how your system is performing.
- Allowed us to quickly throw together a database solution for a growing application that had outgrown its current solution. In a couple of days we had a highly available cost efficient database up and running that was easy to connect to the applications existing infrastructure.
- Some of our sysadmins didnt appreciate the restrictions that aws RDS placed on their ability to manage and monitor the databases that were assigned to them. Many opted for more intricate database systems for our longstanding applications so that they could ensure everything was running well and no data was being compromised.
We mainly used RDS because our infrastructure was already up and running on AWS so the networking between the systems was quite easy to set up and manage. For our Azure infrastructure, we used their SQL database option instead for the same reasons. If AWS made it easier to use the professional tools provided with many SQL suites we would definitely prefer them over the competition, but until that day we will keep our RDS instances platform-specific.