Lead Image © Claudia Paulussen, Fotolia.com

Take your pick from a variety of AWS databases

Choose Carefully

Article from ADMIN 40/2017

By Steffen Grunwald

We look at the variety of databases available in Amazon Web Services – from relational, to NoSQL, to data warehouses for petabyte data volumes.

For quick and easy access to databases in the cloud, you will find the most popular types in the form of a database-as-a-service (DBaaS). In addition to relational databases, NoSQL alternatives enjoy growing popularity. Each database type weighs aspects such as flexibility, read and write speed, resilience, license costs, scalability, and maintainability differently.

Amazon RDS: Managed SQL in the Cloud

Although relational database products differ widely in terms of details, similarities in properties and management processes can be abstracted. The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) provides a common interface (API) that encapsulates vendor-specific aspects. I look at the shared features and benefits of six RDS engines – Amazon Aurora, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB – before going into the specifics of Amazon Aurora.

The RDS API simplifies administrative processes by orchestrating the necessary procedures at the database (DB) and infrastructure levels. For example, to create a DB instance, you do not have to deploy a server explicitly or run the product-specific installation. Instead, a new DB instance is available within minutes. The RDS API is either accessed from the AWS Management Console or used in automation scripts via a Software Development Kit (SDK), with which you can implement approaches such as infrastructure-as-code or use it to respond automatically to events.

In RDS, the database can consist of a single DB instance, which makes economic sense for testing and development purposes. For production use, you can operate the database with two DB instances in a primary-standby configuration. The instances are distributed across different availability zones (AZs) to cover different risk profiles within a region and are handled like separate data centers. This configuration is known as RDS Multi-AZ deployment.

Changes to the

...

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).