Amazon RDS

Amazon Relational Database Service (or Amazon RDS) is a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is a web service running "in the cloud" designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications. Complex administration processes like patching the database software, backing up databases and enabling point-in-time recovery are managed automatically. Scaling storage and compute resources can be performed by a single API call.

Amazon RDS was first released on 22 October 2009, supporting MySQL databases. This was followed by support for Oracle Database in June 2011,Microsoft SQL Server in May 2012,PostgreSQL in November 2013, and MariaDB (a fork of MySQL) in October 2015.

In November 2014 AWS announced Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database offering enhanced high availability and performance.

A new DB instance can be launched from the AWS Management Console or using the Amazon RDS APIs.

Amazon RDS offers different features to support different use cases. Some of the major features are:

Multi-Availability Zone deployments are targeted for production environments. Multi-AZ deployments aim to provide enhanced availability and data durability for MySQL instances. When a database instance is created or modified to run as a Multi-AZ deployment, Amazon RDS automatically provisions and maintains a synchronous “standby” replica in a different Availability Zone (independent infrastructure in a physically separate location). In the event of planned database maintenance or unplanned service disruption, Amazon RDS automatically fails over to the up-to-date standby, allowing database operations to resume without administrative intervention.

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