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If you need a PostgreSQL or MySQL database in AWS, you could launch an EC2 instance, SSH into it, and install the database manually. However, you would be entirely responsible for managing OS security patches, configuring automated backups, setting up replication for high availability, and handling hardware failures.
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed service that handles all of that administrative burden for you.
RDS is not a database itself; it is a management wrapper around popular relational database engines. Currently, RDS supports:
By default, RDS automatically backs up your database every day and saves transaction logs every 5 minutes. This allows for Point-in-Time Recovery. If a developer accidentally drops a critical table at 14:27, you can restore a fresh copy of the database exactly as it was at 14:26.
For production databases, you can enable Multi-AZ (Availability Zone). RDS will automatically provision and maintain a synchronous standby replica in a different physical data center. If the primary database crashes due to a hardware failure, RDS automatically fails over to the standby replica within 60 seconds without changing the database endpoint URL, ensuring your application stays online.
If your application receives a massive amount of read traffic (e.g., a reporting dashboard), you can create Read Replicas. RDS asynchronously replicates data from your primary database to the read replicas, allowing you to route read-heavy queries away from your primary database to improve performance.
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