By Vishal Patil | #vishalcloudjourney

Running a database on your own EC2 instance means you are also the DBA. You patch the OS, schedule backups, set up replication, and wake up when the disk fills. Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) takes that operational work off your plate so you can focus on your application. In this hands-on guide, you'll launch a MySQL database on RDS, lock it down, connect from EC2, test automatic failover, and learn how to scale reads.

What Is Amazon RDS?

Amazon RDS is a managed service for relational databases. You choose the engine and size, and AWS handles the heavy lifting.

Supported engines: Amazon Aurora (MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible), MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, and Db2.

What AWS manages for you

Hardware provisioning and OS patching

Automated backups and point-in-time recovery

Database software patching during a maintenance window

Multi-AZ failover

Monitoring through CloudWatch

What you still manage

Schema design, queries, and…