Amazon Relational Database Service
Developer(s)Amazon.com
Initial releaseOctober 26, 2009; 14 years ago (2009-10-26)[1]
Operating systemCross-platform
Available inEnglish
Typerelational database SaaS
LicenseProprietary
Websiteaws.amazon.com/rds/

Amazon Relational Database Service (or Amazon RDS) is a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services (AWS).[2] 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.[3] Administration processes like patching the database software, backing up databases and enabling point-in-time recovery are managed automatically.[4] Scaling storage and compute resources can be performed by a single API call to the AWS control plane on-demand. AWS does not offer an SSH connection to the underlying virtual machine as part of the managed service.[5]

History

Amazon RDS was first released on 22 October 2009, supporting MySQL databases.[1][6][7] This was followed by support for Oracle Database in June 2011,[8][9] Microsoft SQL Server in May 2012,[10] PostgreSQL in November 2013,[11] and MariaDB (a fork of MySQL) in October 2015,[12] and an additional 80 features during 2017.[13]

In November 2014 AWS announced Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database offering enhanced high availability and performance,[14] and in October 2017 a PostgreSQL-compatible database offering[15][13] was launched.[16]

In March 2019 AWS announced support of PostgreSQL 11 in RDS,[17] five months after official release.

Features

New database instances can be launched from the AWS Management Console or using the Amazon RDS APIs.[18] Amazon RDS offers different features to support different use cases. Some of the major features are:

Multi-Availability Zone (AZ) deployment

In May 2010 Amazon announced Multi-Availability Zone deployment support.[19] Amazon RDS Multi-Availability Zone (AZ) allows users to automatically provision and maintain a synchronous physical or logical "standby" replica, depending on database engine, in a different Availability Zone[20] (independent infrastructure in a physically separate location). Multi-AZ database instance can be developed at creation time or modified to run as a Multi-AZ deployment later. Multi-AZ deployments aim to provide enhanced availability and data durability for MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL and SQL Server[21] instances and are targeted for production environments.[22] 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.

Multi-AZ RDS instances are optional and have a cost associated with them. When creating a RDS instance, the user is asked if they would like to use a Multi-AZ RDS instance. In Multi-AZ RDS deployments backups are done in the standby instance so I/O activity is not suspended any time but users may experience elevated latencies for a few minutes during backups.[23]

Read replicas

Read replicas allow different use cases such as to scale in for read-heavy database workloads. There are up to five replicas available for MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL. Instances use the native, asynchronous replication functionality of their respective database engines.[24] They have no backups configured by default and are accessible and can be used for read scaling.[25] MySQL and MariaDB read replicas can be made writeable again since October 2012;[26] PostgreSQL read replicas do not support it.[25] Replicas are done at database instance level and do not support replication at database or table level.[27]

Performance metrics and monitoring

Performance metrics for Amazon RDS are available from the AWS Management Console or the Amazon CloudWatch API. In December 2015, Amazon announced an optional enhanced monitoring feature that provides an expanded set of metrics for the MySQL, MariaDB, and Aurora database engines.[28]

RDS costs

Amazon RDS instances are priced very similarly to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). RDS is charged per hour and comes in two packages: On-Demand DB Instances[29] and Reserved DB Instances.[29] On-Demand Instances are at an ongoing hourly usage rate. Reserved RDS Instances are offered in 1-year and 3-year terms and include no-upfront, partial-upfront, and all-upfront payment options. Currently, AWS does not offer a 3-year reservation with an "no-upfront" payment option.[30]

Apart from the hourly cost of running the RDS instance, users are charged for the amount of storage provisioned, data transfers and input and output operations performed. AWS have introduced Provisioned Input and Output Operations, in which the user can define how many IO per second are required by their application. IOPS can contribute significantly to the total cost of running the RDS instance.[31]

Amazon RDS also has an Aurora Serverless option. The serverless pricing unit is dollars per ACU hour. ACU stands for 'Aurora Capacity Limit'. This option is designed for customers that need to dramatically scale workloads.[32]

As part of the AWS Free Tier, the Amazon RDS Free Tier helps new AWS customers get started with a managed database service in the cloud for free. You can use the Amazon RDS Free Tier to develop new applications, test existing applications, or simply gain hands-on experience with Amazon RDS.[33]

Automatic backups

Amazon RDS creates and saves automated backups of RDS DB instances.[23] The first snapshot of a DB instance contains the data for the full DB instance and subsequent snapshots are incremental, maximum retention period is 35 days. In Multi-AZ RDS deployments backups are done in the standby instance so I/O activity is not suspended for any amount of time but you may experience elevated latencies for a few minutes during backups.[23]

Operation

Database instances can be managed from the AWS Management Console, using the Amazon RDS APIs and using AWS CLI.[18] Since 1 June 2017,[34] you can stop AWS RDS instances from AWS Management Console or AWS CLI for 7 days at a time. After 7 days, it will be automatically started,[34][35] and since September 2018 RDS instances can be protected from accidental deletion.[36] Increase DB space is supported, but not decrease allocated space.[37] Additionally there is at least a six-hour period where new allocation cannot be done.

Database instance types

As of August 2020, Amazon RDS supports 82 DB instance types - to support different types of workloads:[38][39][40]

  • General Purpose: 31 instances
  • Memory Optimized: 33 instances
  • Previous Generation: 18 instances

General purpose

Instance type Memory EBS optimized / throughput Cores Network performance
db.t2.micro 1 GB 1 cores Low to moderate
db.t2.small 2 GB 1 cores Low to moderate
db.t2.medium 4 GB 2 cores Low to moderate
db.t2.large 8 GB 2 cores Low to moderate
db.t2.xlarge 16 GB 4 cores Moderate
db.t2.2xlarge 32 GB 8 cores Moderate
db.t3.micro 1 GB 2 cores Up to 5 Gbps
db.t3.small 2 GB 2 cores Up to 5 Gbps
db.t3.medium 4 GB 2 cores Up to 5 Gbps
db.t3.large 8 GB 2 cores Up to 5 Gbps
db.t3.xlarge 16 GB 4 cores Up to 5 Gbps
db.t3.2xlarge 32 GB 8 cores Up to 5 Gbps
db.m4.large 8 GB 450 Mbit/s 2 cores Moderate
db.m4.xlarge 16 GB 750 Mbit/s 4 cores High
db.m4.2xlarge 32 GB 1000 Mbit/s 8 cores High
db.m4.4xlarge 64 GB 2000 Mbit/s 16 cores High
db.m4.10xlarge 160 GB 4000 Mbit/s 40 cores 10 Gigabit
db.m4.16xlarge 256 GB 10000 Mbit/s 64 cores 25 Gigabit
db.m5.large 8 GB up to 3500 Mbit/s 2 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.m5.xlarge 16 GB up to 3500 Mbit/s 4 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.m5.2xlarge 32 GB up to 3500 Mbit/s 8 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.m5.4xlarge 64 GB 3500 Mbit/s 16 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.m5.12xlarge 192 GB 7000 Mbit/s 48 cores 10 Gigabit
db.m5.24xlarge 384 GB 14000 Mbit/s 96 cores 25 Gigabit
db.m6g.large 8 GB Up to 4750 Mbit/s 2 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.m6g.xlarge 16 GB Up to 4750 Mbit/s 4 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.m6g.2xlarge 32 GB Up to 4750 Mbit/s 8 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.m6g.4xlarge 64 GB 4750 Mbit/s 16 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.m6g.8xlarge 128 GB 9000 Mbit/s 32 cores 12 Gbps
db.m6g.12xlarge 192 GB 13500 Mbit/s 48 cores 20 Gbps
db.m6g.16xlarge 256 GB 19000 Mbit/s 64 cores 25 Gbps

Memory optimized

Instance type Memory EBS optimized / throughput Cores Network performance
db.r4.large 15.25 GB 437 Mbit/s 2 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.r4.xlarge 30.5 GB 875 Mbit/s 4 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.r4.2xlarge 61 GB 1750 Mbit/s 8 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.r4.4xlarge 122 GB 3500 Mbit/s 16 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.r4.8xlarge 244 GB 7000 Mbit/s 32 cores 10 Gbps
db.r4.16xlarge 488 GB 14000 Mbit/s 64 cores 25 Gbps
db.r5.large 16 GB up to 3500 Mbit/s 2 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.r5.xlarge 32 GB up to 3500 Mbit/s 4 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.r5.2xlarge 64 GB up to 3500 Mbit/s 8 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.r5.4xlarge 128 GB 3500 Mbit/s 16 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.r5.12xlarge 384 GB 7000 Mbit/s 48 cores 10 Gbps
db.r5.24xlarge 768 GB 14000 Mbit/s 96 cores 25 Gbps
db.r6g.large 16 GB up to 4750 Mbit/s 2 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.r6g.xlarge 32 GB up to 4750 Mbit/s 4 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.r6g.2xlarge 64 GB up to 4750 Mbit/s 8 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.r6g.4xlarge 128 GB 4750 Mbit/s 16 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.r6g.8xlarge 256 GB 9000 Mbit/s 32 cores 12 Gbps
db.r6g.12xlarge 384 GB 13500 Mbit/s 48 cores 20 Gbps
db.r6g.16xlarge 512 GB 19000 Mbit/s 64 cores 25 Gbps
db.x1e.xlarge 122 GB 500 Mbit/s 4 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.x1e.2xlarge 244 GB 1000 Mbit/s 8 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.x1e.4xlarge 488 GB 1750 Mbit/s 16 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.x1e.8xlarge 976 GB 3500 Mbit/s 32 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.x1e.16xlarge 1952 GB 7000 Mbit/s 64 cores 10 Gbps
db.x1e.32xlarge 3904 GB 14000 Mbit/s 128 cores 25 Gbps
db.x1.16xlarge 976 GB 7000 Mbit/s 64 cores 10 Gbps
db.x1.32xlarge 1952 GB 14000 Mbit/s 128 cores 25 Gbps
db.z1d.large 16 GB 1 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.z1d.xlarge 32 GB 2 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.z1d.2xlarge 64 GB 4 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.z1d.3xlarge 96 GB 6 cores Up to 10 Gbps
db.z1d.6xlarge 192 GB 12 cores 10 Gbps
db.z1d.12xlarge 384 GB 48 cores 25 Gbps

Previous generation

Instance Type Memory EBS optimized / throughput Cores Network performance
db.t1.micro 0.613 GB 1 cores Very low
db.m1.small 1.7 GB 1 cores Low
db.m1.medium 3.75 GB 1 cores Moderate
db.m1.large 7.5 GB 2 cores Moderate
db.m1.xlarge 15 GB 4 cores High
db.m2.xlarge 17.1 GB 2 cores Moderate
db.m2.2xlarge 34.2 GB 4 cores Moderate
db.m2.4xlarge 68.4 GB 8 cores High
db.m3.medium 3.75 GB 1 cores Moderate
db.m3.large 7.5 GB 2 cores Moderate
db.m3.xlarge 15 GB 500 Mbit/s 4 cores High
db.m3.2xlarge 30 GB 10000 Mbit/s 8 cores High
db.cr1.8xl 244 GB 32 cores 10 Gigabit
db.r3.large 15.25 GB 2 cores Moderate
db.r3.xlarge 30.5 GB 4 cores Moderate
db.r3.2xlarge 61 GB 8 cores High
db.r3.4xlarge 122 GB 16 cores High
db.r3.8xlarge 244 GB 32 cores 10 Gigabit

References

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External links