AWS MasterClass: Databases in the Cloud with AWS RDS [Video]

Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing platform that offers a broad set of global compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services that help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale applications. Ever since its inception - the relational database management systems have gained tremendous popularity across the world. Recently NoSQL databases like MongoDB has also gained a lot of traction - but still, RDBMS remains the de-facto choice of engineers when it comes to storing structured data. According to some estimates - relational databases are used in more than 90% of the software projects out there. With the advent of cloud computing - solution designers and architects had to deal with some unique challenges while attempting to migrate their relational databases to the cloud. You see, relational databases need high-performance hardware and disks to perform at the peak level. But IaaS cloud computing services provide us with virtual servers - which store their data on network connected disks. So to manage relational data in the cloud - we needed a specialized PaaS (platform as a service) which provided adequate hardware and redundancy to relational databases. Amazon Relational Database Service (or Amazon RDS) is a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS RDS is a web service running "in the cloud" designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications. Complex administration processes like patching the database software, backing up databases and enabling point-in-time recovery are managed automatically. Scaling storage and compute resources can be performed by a single API call. Introduction of AWS RDS along with its unique features has made it very simple for us to deploy and grow relational databases to a very large scale in the cloud. What's more - the tight integration that exists between most of the AWS services - makes it seamless to deploy multi-tier complex and scalable applications.