This course explores the cost metrics associated with the Amazon Relational Database Service, known as RDS. Minimizing cloud spend is always a priority when architecting and designing your cloud solutions, and care should be taken to understand where your costs come from and the steps you can take to reduce them.
This course looks at each of the components associated with RDS that incur a cost and how those costs are broken down. It looks at on-demand instances, reserved instances, database storage & I/Os, backup storage, backtrack storage, snapshot export, and data transfer.
If you have any feedback relating to this course, please feel free to contact us at support@cloudacademy.com.
Learning Objectives
- Understand the different database instance purchasing options and payment plans
- Learn about primary storage and I/O pricing options
- Explore the costs associated with backup storage and backtrack storage
- Learn about the pricing for snapshot exports and data transfers
Intended Audience
This course is intended for anyone responsible for designing, operating, and optimizing AWS Database solutions. It would also be advantageous for individuals planning to take the AWS Certified Database - Specialty exam.
Prerequisites
To get the most from this course, you should have a basic understanding of the AWS global infrastructure. It would be beneficial, but not essential, to have a basic awareness of the database engines covered in this course, i.e. Amazon Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQL Server.
Snapshots in RDS are your backups of your database tables and instances, and these snapshots can then be exported out of Amazon RDS, to Amazon S3. You might want to do this perform analysis of the data held within your database using more specific tools, for example, Amazon Athena, which is an interactive query service that allows you to perform analysis on data that you have stored in Amazon S3 using a standard SQL.
You could also use other services, such as Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), however, the point is, the data can be exported from your RDS database to S3 for further in-depth analysis as required.
Also, during an export of a snapshot, you can decide, through filtering, to simply export specific databases, tables, or even schemas.
The cost associated with performing snapshot exports are again based on a region by region basis. The example here shows the costs for the Ireland Region when using MySQL and is based upon a cost per GB of snapshot
For additional security and protection of your exported data, you can encrypt the data using the Key Management Service (KMS). As a result, additional KMS costs would be incurred depending on the KMS key selected. For more information on the Key Management Service, please see our existing course here: https://cloudacademy.com/course/amazon-web-services-key-management-service-kms/
Also, you will also be charged costs associated with Amazon S3 for the storage and your PUT requests. For more information on how Amazon S3 costs are calculated, please see our existing course here: https://cloudacademy.com/course/understanding-optimizing-costs-with-aws-storage-services/
Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation.
To date, Stuart has created 150+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 180,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance.
Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS.
He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape.
In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community.
Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.