AWS Database Management

Introduction

Amazon offers many database solutions within AWS. From relational databases to NoSQL solutions, data warehouses and data lakes, there is no end to the options available for you to host your database.

Database hosting methods

Depending on the type of database you would like to deploy, Amazon offers you many cloud-native, managed service or virtual server solutions.

The first option available to AWS users is installing a database server on a standard EC2 instance. If you do this, you will see no difference to running any other database server. This gives you full control over the operating system and database server settings. 

Unfortunately, this comes with many potential downsides. First, you will be fully responsible for all configurations and maintenance of the database, while many AWS services automate some or all of these issues. Secondly, and more importantly, you will gain none of the benefits of a cloud solution. Scaling to accommodate increased traffic will be difficult or impossible, and keeping the database available when performing maintenance will also provide challenges.

Next, Amazon offers their Relational Database Service (RDS). RDS is a managed service for your relational databases. Unlike with running a database on an EC2 instance, Amazon will take care of the operating system and underlying configurations. You simply need to specify a few settings (CPU size, amount of memory and so on) and Amazon will manage the rest. You will also gain access to several benefits of being in the cloud, such as the ability to easily run your database in multiple availability zones for redundancy and the ability to scale up your database server size to support increased traffic. 

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This comes with a few limitations as well: with Amazon managing the hardware and key configurations, you will not be able to customize quite as (Read more...)