aws relational database service

The AWS RDS service is a core concept in nearly all applications, providing cloud hosted storage for anything we'd need.

Usage

Typically, the RDS database instances are utilized for Online Transaction Processing workloads (OLTP). These are for transactions from applications.

RDS database engine options

Microsoft SQL Server
Oracle
MySQL
PostgreSQL
MariaDB
Amazon Aurora - An Amazon offering that is compatible with PostgreSQL and MySQL while

being significantly more performant and auto-scaling

Launching an RDS

RDS provisioning is extremely easy, can be provisioned in minutes, and have the following features:

Multi-AZ
Failover capability
Automated backups

Note: A manual install in your own datacenter (with testing) using the features above would take upwards of a week to accomplish.

Differences in workloads

Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) - processes data from transactions in real-time
- About data processing and completing large numbers of small transactions in real-time
- Examples: Customer orders, banking transactions, payments, booking systems
Online Analytics Processing (OLAP) - processes complex queries of historical data
- About data analysis using large amounts of data, complex queries, and long running processes
- Examples: analyzing net profit figures from the past several years, sales forecasting