RDS Overview

Cloud Structured Storage

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

This is enough for surface-level programming of a full-fledged web application. We can create various web pages hosted on our EC2 instance. Also, we can store various media and even styles for this web page on an S3 bucket, which we can also easily create.

But for a full-fledged web application, we lack one very important detail - that's a database. After all, we need somewhere to store user data or our product information. You might think that 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 there using regular SQL.

To achieve hosting a database in the cloud, we will use RDS:

Why RDS?

If you've explored the AWS website, you might have seen that there are many different options for cloud database selection. You might wonder, "Why RDS?"

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 streamlines database management, making it a compelling choice for cloud databases.

With this approach, we can fully manage our database from a local computer, not even through the console, but with tools 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, graciously provided by RDS.

Note

In our case, we'll be using a DBMS like MySQL, so make sure you have it installed and know how to use MySQL Workbench to avoid any course-related questions.