A while back, we introduced you to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for non-technical folks and today we’re continuing the discussion with the AWS cloud based Relational Database Service (RDS). Understanding the basic components of AWS like EC2 and RDS are some of the foundation blocks for most software, including mobile applications. Gaining high level knowledge in these areas can help, whether you’re a new engineer, manager or startup founder. And today’s topic is super important. Why? Because a database typically houses the most important information about your product, customers and business.
A database is at its most basic, a repository for information. With a large software product, you might have multiple databases, but for today we’re going to focus on a single database since most companies start with one. A database could be compared to a fancy spreadsheet. Instead of tabs like in Microsoft Excel you might have tables and each table contains different bits of information. The way the information in the tables is laid out is called the data model. This is incredibly important as a software product scales because poorly structured data can be a pain in the you know what later on. So it’s not quite as simple as Excel.
The database for your application needs somewhere to live (like AWS or other cloud providers) and an engine that runs it (like Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, etc). For most of our clients, we use AWS and PostgreSQL. In AWS we have a few hosting options, one is that we could spin up an EC2 instance and install PostgreSQL on that instance and then go from there. However, when we do that, we need to worry about making sure it’s highly available (always up), backed up (disaster recovery) and updated (latest version). If that single EC2 instance were to stop working, then we lose access to our data…and with most applications, that’s not a good thing.
That’s why Amazon introduced the Relational Database Service (RDS). RDS is not a specific type of database or database engine. It’s a managed service running in the AWS cloud for databases that is easy to set up, deploy, scale and update a database with the click of the button. No need to worry about high availability or keeping the database versions up to date. RDS will take care of it for you. Need to have everything backed up? No problem, it’s built in to RDS. Instead of building out everything necessary to have a highly available, durable and updated database, it’s already built into RDS.
On the cost front, RDS can look expensive but consider most companies would need to employ a dedicated person to setup and manage the infrastructure. And instead of days to setup a database, it took a few minutes. That’s time to be used elsewhere. RDS has simplified an incredibly complex process and should be considered as part of any scalable software infrastructure.
We’ve covered what a database is, why it’s important and why you should consider RDS as an easy way to setup a highly reliable database running in the AWS cloud. If you have any questions about how this might fit into your project, send us a note.
