RDS Overview

• Expands to Relational Database Service
• Traditional relational databases that include tables, rows, fields
• On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) type DB
• You can copy a snapshot to another region if you want to have database available in another region
• You scale DB by taking a snapshot and doing a restore to a larger sized tier
• Eliminates much of relational database management
• Can be scaled independently
  • CPU
  • memory
  • storage
  • IOPS 
• AWS manages
  • backups
  • software patching
  • automatic failure detection
  • recovery
• Can trigger, manual or automated backups
• It provides high availability with primary instance which if fails, switch to secondary instance
• Has a soft limit of 40 Amazon RDS DB instances per account
• From 40, up to 10 can be Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server DB instances under the License Included model.
• Customers can Bring Own License (BYOL) model to have all 40 DB instances for Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server
• Supports database engines
  • MySQL
  • MariaDB
  • PostgreSQL
  • Oracle
  • Microsoft SQL Server
  • MySQL-compatible Amazon Aurora
  • AWS IAM controls AWS resources access to Amazon RDS databases.
• For security
  • put database in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
  • using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for data in transit
  • Using encryption for data at rest
• RDS APIs and the AWS Management Console provide a management interface that allows you to create, delete, modify, and terminate RDS DB instances; to create DB snapshots; and to perform point-in-time restores
• There is no AWS data API for Amazon RDS.
• Once a database is created, RDS provides a DNS endpoint for the database which can be used to connect to the database.
• Endpoint does not change over the lifetime of the instance even during the failover in case of Multi-AZ configuration
• RDS leverages Amazon EBS volumes as its data store
• RDS provides database backups, which are replicated across multiple AZ’s
• RDS Multi AZ’s feature synchronously replicate data between a primary RDS DB instance and a standby instance in another Availability Zone, which prevents data loss,
• RDS provides a DNS endpoint and in case of an failure on the primary, it automatically fails over to the standby instance
• RDS also allows Read replicas for the supported databases, which are replicated asynchronously
• RDS Provisioned IOPS, where the IOPS can be specified when the instance is launched and is guaranteed over the life of the instance

AWS RDS limits per region