AWS Crash Course - RDS

Welcome to AWS Crash Course.
What is RDS?

• RDS is Relational Database Service of Amazon.
• It is part of its PaaS offering.
• A new DB instance can easily be launched from AWS management console.
• Complex administration process like patching, backup etc. are manged automatically by RDS.
• Amazon has its own relational database called Amazon Aurora.
• RDS also supports other popular database engines like MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and MariaDB .

RDS Supports Multi AZ(Availability Zone) failovers.
What does that mean?
It means if your primary DB is down. Services will automatically failover to secondary DB in other AZ.

• Multi-AZ deployments for MySQL,Oracle and PostgreSQL engines utilizes synchronous physical replication to keep data on the standby up-to-date with Primary.
• Multi-AZ deployments for the SQL server engine use synchronous logical replication to achieve the same result, employing SQL server native mirroring tech.
• Both approaches safeguard your data in event of a DB instance failure or loss of AZ.
• Backups are taken from secondary DB which avoids I/O suspension to the primary.
• Restore’s are taken from secondary DB which avoids I/O suspension to the primary.
• You can force a failover from one AZ to another by rebooting your DB instance.

But RDS Multi AZ failover is not a scaling Solution.
Read Replicas are for Scaling.
What are Read Replicas?
As we discussed above Multi AZ is synchronous replication of DB.  While read replicas are asynchronous replication of DB.

• You can have 5 read replicas for both MySQL and PostgreSQL.
• You can have read replicas in different regions but for MySQL only.
• Read replica’s can be built off Multi-AZ’s databases.
• You can have read replica’s of read replica’s , however only for MySQL and this will further increase latency.
• You can use read replicas for generating reports. By this you won’t put load on the primary DB.

RDS supports automated backups.
But keep these things in mind.

• There is a performance hit if Multi-AZ is not enabled.
• If you delete an instance then all automated backups are deleted, however manual db snapshots will not be deleted.
• All snapshots are stored on S3.
• When you do a restore , you can change the engine type(e.g. SQL standard to SQL enterprise) provided you have enough storage space.

Hope the above snapshot give you a decent understanding of RDS. If you want to try some handson check this tutorial .
This series is created to give you a quick snapshot of AWS technologies.  You can check about other AWS services in this series over here .