Managed Databases on AWS: Overview

Now that we know about the different types of databases, let’s see what AWS has to offer.

Because databases are a core piece of technology for most applications, AWS also offers a wide range of database types. All the database types discussed in the last lesson are supported by AWS.

Relational databases on AWS

Relational databases on AWS are all managed under the umbrella of the Relational Database Services (RDS).

RDS databases can be grouped into two categories: databases under the RDS name and Amazon Aurora. Both services offer managed relational databases, but their properties differ.

RDS

RDS branded databases are the oldest and most mature database offerings by AWS. They’ve been available since 2009. All RDS databases are named “RDS for X,” where X is the database engine. Database engine is another way of referring to a database management system (DBMS).

RDS supports the following relational databases engines:

• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• MariaDB
• Oracle
• Microsoft SQL Server

Even though SQL is a standardized language to interact with relational databases, all database engines added additional features on top of the SQL language and therefore behave slightly differently. For simple applications, it might be easily possible to swap out the database engine without any code changes, but this is generally not true for complex applications that use engine-specific features. Therefore, it’s important to pick ...