RDS Overview

Cloud Structured Storage

You already understand how cloud technologies work, how we can store different data in cloud storage, and how we can set up our own small server to interact with.

This is enough for basic programming of a complete web application. We can create various web pages hosted on our EC2 instance. Additionally, we can store various media and even styles for this web page in an S3 bucket, which we can also easily set up.

However, for a full-fledged web application, there's one crucial detail missing — that's a database. After all, we need a place to store user data or our product information. You might think all of this could simply be stored in an S3 bucket, but we need this information to be structured, and we need to be able to retrieve data from it using regular SQL.

To host a database in the cloud, we will use RDS.

Why RDS?

If you've browsed the AWS website, you may have noticed that there are many different options for cloud database selection.

RDS stands out for its fully managed services, supporting various popular database engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. With features such as automated backups and scalability, RDS simplifies database management, making it an attractive option for cloud databases.

With this approach, we can fully manage our database from a local computer, not even through the console, but with tools that are convenient for you, such as pgAdmin for PostgreSQL or MySQL Workbench for MySQL. This means our workflow won't be any different from working with a database stored locally. The only difference is that the data won't take up space on your workstation; it will be stored in the cloud, generously provided by RDS.