In this course, we will provide a framework to help you evaluate appropriate database deployment solutions on AWS using either the Amazon Relational Database Service, RDS, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2 instances.
Learning Objectives
- Choose between using Amazon RDS or EC2 instances for your relational database deployments
Intended Audience
- Anyone who is responsible for defining and implementing relational database solution architectures in AWS
- Anyone who is looking to migrate an existing application that uses a relational database backend to the AWS Cloud
Prerequisites
- A basic understanding of relational databases, Amazon RDS, and Amazon EC2
- For more information about these services, I encourage you to check out these lectures:
Hello, and welcome to the final lecture in this course, where I want to quickly summarize what we’ve covered.
In this course, we discussed the various features and options you should consider when choosing between Amazon RDS or EC2 instances for your cloud database deployments. RDS makes it easy to quickly set up and operate relational databases in the AWS Cloud using popular database engines such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. RDS automatically handles tedious, time-consuming administrative tasks like configuring high availability, backups, patching, and security while abstracting away the underlying server.
On the other hand, EC2 instances allow you to have total control over the underlying server, but require much more care and feeding when it comes to manual administration, both in terms of patching the operating system and database engine, as well as configuring features that are already provided by RDS like high availability, backups, and encryption.
While database deployments on EC2 instances do generally cost less than with RDS, many organizations will make up this cost difference in the labor saved by not needing to perform so many manual administrative tasks. That being said, EC2 instance deployments are still necessary in situations where you need to run a database that isn’t supported by RDS. Aside from that, however, there are no hard and fast rules for when you must choose RDS or EC2 instances for a particular database deployment.
That brings me to the end of this lecture, and to the end of this course. You should now be able to describe the pros and cons of database deployments using RDS or EC2 instances and determine which is a more appropriate solution based on a given set of requirements.
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Thank you so much for your time and best of luck with your continued learning!
Danny has over 20 years of IT experience as a software developer, cloud engineer, and technical trainer. After attending a conference on cloud computing in 2009, he knew he wanted to build his career around what was still a very new, emerging technology at the time — and share this transformational knowledge with others. He has spoken to IT professional audiences at local, regional, and national user groups and conferences. He has delivered in-person classroom and virtual training, interactive webinars, and authored video training courses covering many different technologies, including Amazon Web Services. He currently has six active AWS certifications, including certifications at the Professional and Specialty level.