Explain the features of Amazon Relational Database System

In this recipe, we will learn about Amazon Relational Database System. We will also learn about the features of Amazon Relational Database System.

Recipe Objective - Explain the features of the Amazon Relational Database System?

The Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is widely used and is defined as a service that is easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. It frees users to focus on their applications so users can give them fast performance, high availability, security, and compatibility whenever they need. Amazon Relational Database System(RDS) is further available on several database instance types - optimized for memory, performance, or I/O and provides users with six familiar database engines to choose from, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle Database, and SQL Server. Users can use the AWS Database Migration Service to easily migrate or replicate their existing databases to Amazon RDS. Amazon Relational Database Service was first released on the 22 October 2009, supporting MySQL databases and this was followed by support for Oracle Database in June 2011, Microsoft SQL Server in May 2012, PostgreSQL in November 2013 and MariaDB (which is a fork of MySQL) in October 2015 and an additional 80 features during the year 2017. In November 2014, AWS announced Amazon Aurora which is a MySQL-compatible database offering enhanced high availability and performance and in October 2017, a PostgreSQL-compatible database offering was launched. In March 2019, Amazon Web Services announced support of the PostgreSQL 11 in RDS, five months after the official release.

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Benefits of Amazon Relational Database System

  • The Amazon Relational Database System runs on the same highly reliable infrastructure used by the other Amazon Web Services and when users provision a Multi-AZ DB Instance, Amazon RDS synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in the different Availability Zone (AZ). Amazon RDS provides many other features which enhance the reliability of critical production databases, including automated backups, database snapshots, and automatic host replacement and thus it's always available and durable. Amazon RDS engine types allow users to launch one or more Read Replicas to offload read traffic from the user's primary database instance and thus users can scale their database's compute and storage resources with only a few mouse clicks or an API call, often with no downtime ad thus, it's highly scalable. Amazon Relational Database System makes it easy to control network access to user's database and it also lets the user run their database instances in the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which enables further enables users to isolate their database instances and to connect to their existing IT infrastructure through an industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN. Many Amazon RDS engine types offer encryption at rest and encryption in transit and thus offers security. Amazon Relational Database System supports the most demanding database applications and users can choose between two SSD-backed storage options i.e. firstly optimized for high-performance OLTP applications, and the other for cost-effective general-purpose use. In addition, Amazon Aurora provides performance on par with commercial databases at 1/10th the cost and thus do operations at a faster speed.

System Requirements

  • Any Operating System(Mac, Windows, Linux)

This recipe explains the Amazon Relational Database System and Features of the Amazon Relational Database System.

Features of Amazon Relational Database System

    • It provides General Purpose (SSD) Storage and Provisioned IOPS (SSD) Storage

Amazon Relational Database System General Purpose Storage is defined as an SSD-backed storage option which delivers a consistent baseline of 3 IOPS per provisioned GB and provides the ability to burst up to 3,000 IOPS above the baseline. This storage type is suitable for a broad range of database workloads. Also, Amazon Relational Database Storage Provisioned IOPS Storage is defined as an SSD-backed storage option designed to deliver fast, predictable, and consistent I/O performance. Users can specify an IOPS rate when creating a database instance, and Amazon RDS provisions that IOPS rate for the lifetime of the database instance and this storage type is optimized for I/O-intensive transactional (OLTP) database workloads. Users can provision up to 40,000 IOPS per database instance, although their actual realized IOPS may vary based on their database workload, instance type, and database engine choice.

    • It provides Scalability

Amazon Relational Database System provides Push-button compute scaling which can be used to scale the compute and memory resources powering user's deployment up or down, up to a maximum of 32 vCPUs and 244 GiB of RAM and compute scaling operations typically complete in a few minutes. Amazon RDS provides Easy storage scaling and as the storage requirements grow, users can also provide additional storage, the Amazon Aurora engine will automatically grow the size of the database volume as the user's database storage needs grow, up to a maximum of 64 TB or a maximum you define. The MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and PostgreSQL engines allow users to scale up to 64 TB of storage and SQL Server supports up to 16 TB. Storage scaling is on the fly with zero downtime.

    • It provides Availability and durability

Amazon Relational Database System provides the automated backup feature which enables point-in-time recovery for the user's database instance. Amazon RDS enables backup of the user's database and transaction logs and stores both for a user-specified retention period. This allows users to restore their database instance to any second during your retention period, up to the last five minutes. The user's automatic backup retention period can be configured to up to thirty-five days. Amazon RDS provides Database snapshots which are user-initiated backups of user's instances stored in the Amazon S3 that are kept until users explicitly delete them and users can create a new instance from a database snapshot whenever they desire. Although database snapshots serve operationally as full backups, users are billed only for incremental storage use.

  • It provides Multi-AZ deployments and Automatic host replacement

Amazon Relational Database System offers Multi-AZ deployments which further provide enhanced availability and durability for the database instances, making them a natural fit for production database workloads. When users provision a Multi-AZ database instance, Amazon RDS synchronously replicates their data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ). Amazon RDS automatically replaces the compute instance powering the user's deployment in the event of a hardware failure.

  • It provides Encryption at rest and in transit

Amazon Relational Database System allows users to encrypt their databases using keys they manage through AWS Key Management Service (KMS). On a database instance running with Amazon RDS encryption, data stored at rest in the underlying storage is encrypted, as are its automated backups, read replicas, and snapshots. Amazon RDS also supports Transparent Data Encryption in the SQL Server and Oracle. Transparent Data Encryption in Oracle is integrated with AWS CloudHSM, which allows users to securely generate, store, and manage their cryptographic keys in the single-tenant Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS cloud.

  • It provides Resource-level permissions

Amazon Relational Database System is defined as an integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and provides users with the ability to control the actions that their AWS IAM users and groups can take on specific Amazon RDS resources, from the database instances through snapshots, parameter groups, and option groups. Users can also tag their Amazon RDS resources and control the actions that their IAM users and groups can take on groups of resources that have the same tag and associated value. For eg, users can configure their IAM rules to ensure developers can modify "Development" database instances but only the Database Administrators can make changes to "Production" database instances.

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