What is Amazon RDS ?

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What is Amazon RDS?
Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is AWS's relational database service.

The databases supported are Amazon Aurora (which is a MySQL compatible database), MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB.

It's fully managed by Amazon, and they take care of the patching, backups and restores. You can use the standard tools to manage the databases. But obviously you do not have full access to the database engine.

You can create an empty database when you first create an RDS instance. To "restore" data to it, you would need to script the data from the source database and then run the script on the database instance to populate it.

When you create an RDS database instance with the Multi-AZ deployment option, RDS creates a primary database instance in one availability zone, and a standby instance in a different availability zone (AZ).

There is a unique DNS name for the database instance which you can use in your application to access the database. When the database instance is setup with the Multi-AZ deployment option, there is a DNS name for the "clustered" database instances and a DNS name for each of the primary and standby database instances. Use the DNS name of the "cluster" where ever possible because in the rare instance that a database failover occurs, your application will always be able to access the "primary" database.

I have written a blog about Amazon RDS here:

http://networkadministratorsurvivalkit.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/amazon-relational-database-service-rds.html