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Amazon Relational Database Service Review
September 03, 2019

Amazon Relational Database Service Review

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

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Relational Database Service

Amazon Relational Database Service is used to host databases accessed by web applications that are on servers hosted within AWS EC2. There is also a database hosted in RDS used by end-user desktop applications.
  • As with all AWS services, it is fast and easy to get set up.
  • It integrates well with the rest of your infrastructure hosted within AWS.
  • The point in time backup/restore options work well.
  • There are use cases where you have to delete and recreate your entire database instance just to change one thing.
  • SQL Server backup and restore to file is not a simple GUI-driven process.
  • Read replicas are not offered for Microsoft SQL databases.
  • RDS makes projects much easier. Set up time is decreased, and it is very easy to create and destroy databases as needed for testing.
  • The ability to call AWS tech support for database-level issues and advice is a money saver if you don't have a high-end DBA on your team or need someone else to set things up with a little assistance.
  • It is cheap and easy to grant secure access to your RDS instances to other companies or divisions of your company that use AWS.
It's good. You just have to know its limitations and design around them. For example, there is no operating system level access to files for things like backup/restore. You can use workarounds with S3 storage. You can't use read replicas with MS SQL databases.
All AWS support teams have been very helpful in giving setup advice, troubleshooting, etc.
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Setting up your own database servers on EC2 instances is slower and more work. It also doesn't come with tech support for the database. It's usually best to use an AWS service for anything you can, rather than building your own.
If you have the rest of your infrastructure in AWS, it is easiest to use Relational Database Service for your databases rather than build out your own servers in EC2. The server maintenance, clusters, etc. are all done for you, and you have technical support you can call rather than having to troubleshoot everything yourself.
If you have non-Microsoft databases, you have the ability to set up read replicas so your database writes are not slowed down.