Database Creation and Configuration

Let's move on to creating a database instance in AWS RDS.

To do this, navigate to the RDS service and click on the Create database button:

You'll see a large menu with a plethora of settings. Let's go through them step by step.

• Select the Standard method for creating a database instance:

• Next, we select the DBMS we'll be using, which, in our case, is MySQL:

Note

We're using MySQL because it's easy to learn and straightforward to set up and use. If you have other preferences, such as PostgreSQL, feel free to choose them for your needs.

We select the desired version of MySQL.

• Next, since we're operating in the free tier, we need to choose the template for the free tier:

• Now we need to give our database a name and set the username and password to be used for connecting to the database. In my case, I set the name as root for the main user, a simple password, and an obvious name:

• For the Instance configuration and Storage sections, we don't change anything because the template automatically provides the necessary information for us. Since we're using the free tier, we're limited in resources and don't have much choice:

• After that, you'll see a large section on connectivity. There are several important points here. In this chapter, we won't be connecting the database to EC2, so select the option Don’t connect to an EC2 compute resource:

• A very important point is enabling the database's public accessibility so that we can connect to it from our workbench without using a complex SSL key connection:

Note

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a security technology that creates an encrypted connection between a web server and a user's browser. The goal of SSL is to provide confidentiality, authentication, and data integrity in Internet communications.

• Heading towards the finish line, we select the security group that we created for our EC2 instance. Next, we'll also be supplementing this security group to meet our needs:

The last point we should pay attention to is Database authentication. Here, we need to select Password authentication because it's the most convenient and straightforward type of authentication that we currently need:

Press the button to create the database and be satisfied with the work done.

Note

You may notice that there are many other settings that we haven't touched upon. At the moment, we don't need all these settings as they will be used for more complex applications and development and will be covered if needed.

In the following chapters, we will also connect to the database we created and learn how to use it.