Item: Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Rating: 9
Author: Anthony Aziz

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use RDS to manage multiple MySQL instances across our environments for production, toolsets, replication, and backup.

Pros and Cons

Replication
Updates
Redundancy

Performance Insights has a pretty small limit on its query reporting, which can make it difficult to track down the queries it reports.
RDS Console UI can be clunky and inconsistent in some areas. New versions are not always better than previous versions.
Metrics are not always descriptive at a glance and require some digging through documentation. Ie. BurstBalance vs CPUBurstBalance.

Return on Investment

RDS allows us to focus our resources on developing our product and not configuring/maintaining our own MySQL hosts.
RDS provides a wealth of metrics to monitor our production system and feeds nicely into alarms and other alarming tools.
RDS is straightforward to configure our DR needs with multi-AZ, replication, and backups.
RDS helps keep us on top of updates and configuration changes with minimal downtime and risk.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon DynamoDB, Microsoft SQL Server and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

We prefer RDS to spin up our own MySQL instances via traditional servers, EC2 instances, or containers, and RDS provides all of our DB needs compared to other database products AWS offers. As mentioned, the manageable, operational, security, and reliability features of RDS that are provided out of the box allow us to benefit from a full-featured MySQL system without investing time, resources, and personnel into setting up and maintaining another solution.

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

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Email Service

Likelihood to Recommend

RDS should be able to cover the vast majority of DB use cases for various applications. We have used MySQL and MSSQL clusters, and have investigated Aurora, but the depth of options, configurations, and features go much deeper.

Amazon RDS provides powerful MySQL instances with minimal investment and risk.

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)