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AWS RDS - Let a huge part of database complexity to be handled by AWS at a fair price.
September 10, 2019

AWS RDS - Let a huge part of database complexity to be handled by AWS at a fair price.

Erlon Sousa Pinheiro | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Relational Database Service

At my current organization, we are using Amazon Relational Databases as our first option databases, supporting our DevOps environment. Currently, our monitoring system (based on Zabbix) and our configuration management system (based on Puppet) are using it as the main database. In our team, all databases are being based on AWS RDS PostgreSQL so far.
  • AWS products on average, excel at high availability. RDS is a good example of that.
  • Easy scaling. Just a few clicks.
  • Load balancing in a transparent way.
  • Sometimes you can't install specific items like modules.
  • You are not able to use different DB versions from those provided by AWS.
  • AWS keeps DB logs for a short time. If you have a problem and need to check something beyond the retention period, you can't.
  • You can easily increase your database environment without a huge investment.
  • If you need specific resources that are not available without huge customization, maybe RDS is not the best approach for you.
  • AWS also provides its DB flavour, called Aurora, which intends to be faster, reliable and cheaper than traditional commercial solutions like MS SQL Server and Oracle.
Actually you can have most of these tools through AWS Relational Database Service as they are basically those technologies provided as a service. It is way better to have those products provided as a service through a huge and reliable infrastructure like AWS.
I had some situations where I expected more from the RDS support team. Basically, you can't trust RDS 100% (like any other product). You need to monitor it yourself, check backups, maybe extract those database logs from AWS and store in a local resource.
Using Amazon Relational Database Service you have almost everything that is needed in a database environment. High availability, backup and recovery processes are already in place, with load balancing, updates and so on. For sure your demands for a DBA will be smaller than if you had an on-premises environment since most of the job is performed by AWS. Just have on mind that you will have to expand your knowledge to cover some specific aspects of a cloud database environment.

Using Amazon Relational Database Service

I've been using AWS Relational Database Services in several projects in different environments and from the AWS products, maybe this one together to EC2 are my favourite. They deliver what they promise. Reliable, fast, easy and with a fair price (in comparison to commercial products which have obscure license agreements).