Quick Start to AWS: Databases
Part 1: Introduction to RDS, Aurora & DynamoDB
Last Updated: 20th April 2022
This is another edition of “Quick Start to AWS”, which serves to help individuals and perhaps even organizations quickly get started easily on AWS Cloud. It is meant to be beginner-friendly and easy to understand, so as to not overload my audience with the vast capabilities of AWS. This piece focuses on Databases in AWS, mainly an introduction to DynamoDB, RDS and Aurora.
Most applications require a database to store information such as user data, products, and others. They are important systems that are used to store, manage, update and retrieve data for all types of applications, from office systems to e-commerce websites.
AWS provides various database services to suit your needs. This includes relational databases like MySQL and MSSQL, NoSQL Databases and more. We will briefly go through the 3 most common ones
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed document database service provided by AWS that utilizes key-value and delivers <10ms performance at any scale. It supports many features like built-in security, backup and restores, and in-memory caching. It also supports multi-region and multi-master deployments to handle more than 10 trillion requests per day and spikes of more than 20 million requests per second.
DynamoDB is very suitable for use cases such as mobile applications, session data storage, gaming applications, IoT and other applications that require low-latency read and write to data at any scale. Being fully managed also means that DynamoDB requires minimal maintenance from your end and allows you to focus on your development.
According to AWS, some of the companies using DynamoDB heavily in their workloads include Toyota, Lyft and Airbnb.
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Amazon RDS is another commonly used database service provided by AWS. It is a managed service that makes it very quick and easy to set up, operate and scale relational databases in the cloud. RDS aims to be cost-efficient and scalable while removing time-consuming tasks such as hardware maintenance, patching and backups from the customer.
RDS allows you to select various database instance types, similar to EC2, based on your requirements. The offerings include instances optimized for memory, performance or I/O intensive loads. It also supports commonly used database engines like PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and more.
AWS also realizes the trouble of database migration and has also provided an AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to help ease the process of migrating existing on-premises databases into RDS.
According to AWS, some popular companies utilizing RDS are Intuit Mint, Cathay Pacific Airways and Samsung.
Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora is similar to RDS in that it is also provides relational databases, albeit with some differences, pros and cons. Unlike RDS, Aurora is only compatible with MySQL And PostgreSQL. However, Aurora is much faster than typical databases and also more cost effective. Being a fully managed service, it also provides security, availability and reliability comparable with commercial databases but at a tiny fraction of the cost.
Aurora handles time-consuming tasks like database setup, patching, backups, hardware, maintenance and more. It also comes with fault-tolerant infrastructure to deliver high performance and availability and low latency with redundancy through read replicas, point-in-time recover, replication across availability zones and more. Aurora also comes with a serverless option if you prefer that.
According to AWS, some popular companies that utilize Aurora include Samsung, DoorDash and Pokemon.
