John Brandon explains how businesses can use AWS RDS for managing relational cloud databases.
One of the most mature and well-known cloud computing products is called Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service). Launched in 2009, the service is designed to store relational database instances in the cloud for access by applications and as a way to provide relational databases for analytics, reporting, and business dashboards within those apps.
To understand RDS, it’s important to take a step back and define a relational database. The concept was invented way back in 1970, and it’s essentially a way to store data in a format that is more useful and streamlined. A relational database consists of tables that can be interrelated — the data is structured in a tabular form and each piece of data can use an identifier. Typically this involves a unique key, although as you can imagine, a database with multiple tables and thousands of rows with unique identifiers quickly becomes complex.
Because of the complexity of a large relational database, there are performance considerations to think about — and other factors including scaling the relational database, accessing it from anywhere using any app, the security needed to protect the data, and the IT infrastructure required to support the database. Companies tend to use multiple relational databases as well.
That’s where Amazon RDS comes into play. Because RDS runs in the cloud as a service (and is part of Amazon Web Services or AWS), it provides both flexibility and scale. This helps companies as they grow, expand to other areas and provide additional services to customers. You can scale your business apps and the data without having to scale your infrastructure.
Benefits of RDS
Many of the benefits of using RDS are similar to the benefits of using the cloud. This includes the flexibility of where the relational database is stored, first and foremost. A company might offer a customer-facing application used on a smartphone or other mobile device, or an internal application for a large company that runs on an internal website. Users might need to access the relational database from a variety of devices, from many different locations, but the cloud makes the data accessible in a way that makes it seem like the data center is sitting right next to you.
That’s because Amazon RDS has one key advantage — your IT staff do not need to manage it, or even have to get to grips with database design software, and the RDS can scale as your needs change. One example of how this works is when you compare a typical server in a data center to one in the RDS cloud. You might purchase a server with a set amount of memory, storage, and performance. Then, when you build an application that accesses the database on that server, you are stuck with the allocations you selected (or you have to manage them and adjust them). With RDS, the entire infrastructure is “serverless” in that it can adjust to your needs — whether…
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