Amazon RDS

Amazon RDS is a relational database management system along with the facilities of the AWS cloud platform. It facilitates us in creating database instances as per our requirements, i.e. resizable, variety of database types, etc. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the AWS Cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.

Traditionally, database management used to be a very scattered service, from the webserver to the application server and then finally to the database. For the maintenance of such a vast system a team was required, to shrink this workforce, AWS came across an amazing all-in-one service, RDS. The whole architecture of RDS includes every aspect of the traditional management system, all in place. Thus, it includes everything from EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) to DNS (Domain Name System). Every part of the RDS architecture has its own separate set of features completely different from each other. A diagrammatical representation of RDS has been attached ahead.

Use Cases Of Amazon RDS (AWS)

Below are some use cases of Amazon RDS mostly used for secured and highly configured applications like gaming servers and health and financial applications.

1. Web Application: The Amazon RDS is mainly used for the backend for web applications where it can support maximum no. of in and output operation. And also is easy to scale up and down.
2. Managed Database: Instead of you managing the database AWS will provide Amazon RDS as a service by just doing some configuration your database will be available to perform the operations.
3. Isolation: You can integrate and configure multiple applications with secure isolation by protecting the data of each application’s customers while managing the underlying infrastructure.
4. Highly Secured: You can use Amazon RDS for domains like health care and banking because the data used in this type of application is highly secure which can be achieved with the help of AWS RDS.

Amazon RDS Alternatives

1. MySQL – It is the 2nd most preferred open-source RDBMS in the world. It is developed by Oracle. It is not typically cloud-based in nature like Amazon RDS, i.e. it can be used on PC as well. It is also offered as one of the options on RDS to choose as Database Engine. It supports five server operating systems. The main application of MySQL is in the e-commerce domain, data warehouse, and logging application.
2. PostgreSQL – It is one of the oldest RDBMS. It is also one of the popularly used open-source RDBMS. It was developed by PostgreSQL Global Development Group in 1989. It is a cross-platform software, and it supports more operating systems as compared to others. Its primary focus is maintaining the security of the data and it is a vast kingdom of user-defined functions.
3. MariaDB – It is the most compatible RDBMS, and it supports both secondary database models, i.e. Spatial & Graph. It was released in 2009, by Maria DB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise). It supports a wide range of programming languages and also allows users to introduce server-side scripts. One of the best features of MariaDB is that it focuses on high-level security in the community of MariaDB continuously finding and fixing the issues for MariaDB.

Advantages of Amazon RDS

Amazon RDS is a managed database service. It's responsible for most management tasks. By eliminating tedious manual processes, Amazon RDS frees you to focus on your application and your users.

Amazon RDS provides the following principal advantages over database deployments that aren't fully managed:

• You can use database engines that you are already familiar with: IBM Db2, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle Database, and PostgreSQL.
• Amazon RDS manages backups, software patching, automatic failure detection, and recovery.
• You can turn on automated backups, or manually create your own backup snapshots. You can use these backups to restore a database. The Amazon RDS restore process works reliably and efficiently.
• You can get high availability with a primary DB instance and a synchronous secondary DB instance that you can fail over to when problems occur. You can also use read replicas to increase read scaling.
• In addition to the security in your database package, you can control access by using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to define users and permissions. You can also help protect your databases by putting them in a virtual private cloud (VPC).

The primary components of the preceding architecture are as follows:

Elastic Load Balancing

AWS routes user traffic through Elastic Load Balancing. A load balancer distributes workloads across multiple compute resources, such as virtual servers. In this sample use case, the Elastic Load Balancer forwards client requests to application servers.

Application servers

Application servers interact with RDS DB instances. An application server in AWS is typically hosted on EC2 instances, which provide scalable computing capacity. The application servers reside in public subnets with different Availability Zones (AZs) within the same Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). .

RDS DB instances

The EC2 application servers interact with RDS DB instances. The DB instances reside in private subnets within different Availability Zones (AZs) within the same Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Because the subnets are private, no requests from the internet are permitted.

The primary DB instance replicates to another DB instance, called a read replica. Both DB instances are in private subnets within the VPC, which means that Internet users can't access them directly.