Backups vs Snapshots
Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is a Database as a Service solution that allows you to manage a DBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL in a dedicated environment. All the database administration tasks are executed by Amazon allowing you to focus exclusively on scaling your database and choosing the right instance. Amazon RDS patches your DBMS software and provides all backups automatically, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period and enabling point-in-time recovery. As a service designed also to support already existing applications, you can control it via API to setup your database environment or increase instance capacity.
Amazon RDS supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and now their own Aurora DB. Scaling databases is one of the most difficult tasks for developers and system administrators, for this reason, learning how to use Amazon RDS could greatly simplify the way you manage your data into your web or mobile application.
In the last years Giorgio spent much of his time on the design and deployment of platforms based on new technologies like NoSQL Databases (MongoDB, HBase, Cassandra), Software Defined Networking (OpenFlow, Open vSwitch), Virtualization (Xen, Linux KVM, VMware) and Cloud Computing (OpenStack, Eucalyptus). He has a very deep knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS), RackSpace Cloud and related services, and has worked with many other IaaS / PaaS platforms (Google Cloud, Heroku, AppFog etc.).