Item: Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon [Relational Database Services (RDS)] is deployed as a primary datastore for a number of applications within our infrastructure. It allows us to offload the typical Database Server Maintenance/Configuration and even System Management to Amazon, which ultimately reduces the cost of our System Administration overhead. Amazon makes it very easy to customize the configuration for each RDS deployment with a number of database engines, as well as set up automatic fail over, automated backups, and the ability to resize your database deployment seamlessly, should your application requirements call for additional resources.

Pros and Cons

Removes the burden of host OS maintenance
Simple configuration and management
Automatic, easy to restore, backups

You don't have os-level or hardware-level access to the system, so all your performance tuning needs to be done within your application or within the parameters of the database engine that amazon allows you to customize.
Customizations/Extensions to the database engines are impossible, as you don't have OS-level access.
Migrating in/out of RDS with zero down time can be relatively challenging from a configuration and execution perspective, depending on your infrastructure.

Return on Investment

Reduced overhead in management of host system
Reduced maintenance requirements for keeping database engine up to date and applying security patches
Reduced risk of data-loss during an outage do to automatically configured and maintained multi-zone replication and backups
Reduced risk of data leakage, leveraging amazon's engineering/admin/ops teams to maintain network and server security.

Alternatives Considered

MySQL, Amazon Redshift and MariaDB

We've evaluated using [Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)] against same-capability configurations with MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and even Amazon Redshift (though, we haven't evaluated redshift in quite some time). Assuming RDS checks all the boxes for the requirements of your applications, it makes a great alternative to self-hosting and managing a custom deployment of any of the database servers it supports. Being able to deploy replication/backup servers in multiple availability zones just by selecting an option, and provision servers with some simple API calls, makes it a clear winner in that use-case.

RDS better fit with the application model we were looking for, than Redshift did, at the time of our evaluation. Though, I'm not as familiar with the current Redshift feature-set. I assume if you're evaluating Redshift as a legitimate solution, it's probably better than RDS, as it's more designed for data warehousing.

Key Insights

Do you think Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Hotjar, Bugsnag, Slack, Dropbox Business, Amazon ElastiCache, Laravel PHP Framework, Cloudflare, GitHub

Likelihood to Recommend

If you're operating within the Amazon universe of cloud computing, it's almost a no-brainer to utilize [Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)]. RDS is well suited for probably a majority of applications that are candidates to host on a cloud computing platform as it reduces overall management and complexity of your system.

However, if you're doing a lot of data exporting/importing using tools that write to/read from the disk on the server, you may have challenges integrating RDS, as you have no access to the underlying host.

RDS is a great solution to simplify infrastructure overhead and complexity

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)