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Amazon RDS pros and cons

Vendor: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

4.2 out of 5

57 reviews
98% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Amazon RDS offers a fully managed, scalable database service, simplifying administrative tasks and enhancing security with KMS encryption. Users benefit from features like automatic backups and disaster recovery options. However, while database provisioning is efficient, initial configuration requirements and limited database support, excluding platforms like Db2, present challenges. Migration complexity, high pricing, and inconsistent technical support potentially hinder its appeal, despite compliance with HIPAA and PCI DSS standards.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Amazon RDS offers fast provisioning with no need for hardware preparation, allowing users to create an instance quickly and have a database ready to use.

It is a fully managed database that handles most administrative tasks, enabling users to focus more on business activities.

The service provides valuable features such as snapshots, automatic backups, and disaster recovery, ensuring high availability and data durability.

Amazon RDS is noted for its stability, scalability, and ease of deployment, making it an efficient choice for database management.

With customizable performance and security features like integration with AWS Secrets Manager and data encryption, Amazon RDS supports compliance and data security needs effectively.

CONS

Amazon RDS could simplify the initial configuration and installation process.

An improvement in technical support and availability would be beneficial, as current support lacks expertise and responsiveness.

A predictable pricing strategy and lower costs would enhance user satisfaction.

Migrating from on-premises solutions is challenging and requires simplification for seamless transitions.

Amazon RDS should include more database support and integration with third-party solutions such as Microsoft products.

Amazon RDS Pros review quotes

EB

Senior Consultant at Mark Gurry & Associates

Jul 4, 2024

The product's initial setup phase is totally easy.

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GK

Gurudeva Kalledevarpurada B

IT Solution Architect at HCS

Apr 3, 2020

It makes it easy to administer the database. It helps to scale your database by providing Read Replicas, which reduce transaction time. It is highly available and durable which helps in disaster recovery and management.

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Lead Data Engineer at Seven Lakes Enterprises, Inc.

Aug 1, 2022

I recommend RDS because it makes your life super easy.

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SR

Sivashankar Rajaram

Principal engineer at Verizon

Jun 2, 2020

The most valuable feature is that it is a fully managed database, where they handle most of the administrative tasks and leaves the users more time to concentrate on business.

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MA

Owner at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

Oct 1, 2021

Being able to change the size of an RDS MySQL instance is amazing.

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reviewer2592669

Director Software Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 5, 2025

The biggest advantage of Amazon RDS, which is basically an AWS service, is that you can customize it.

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reviewer1472997

CTO at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

Jan 24, 2021

The product is very, very easy to use.

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reviewer2252781

Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Sep 19, 2023

The most valuable features of Amazon RDS are its scalability, reliability, and intelligence.

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BS

AWS Architect at Virtual University

Jun 4, 2025

The impact of Amazon RDS scalability and backup has been positive, with good vertical scaling, scale up and down, horizontal scaling, and storage scaling.

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Shaamil Ashraff

Architect - Database Administration at Mitra Innovation

Jun 3, 2022

The time to install or set up a database environment is very fast.

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Amazon RDS Cons review quotes

EB

Senior Consultant at Mark Gurry & Associates

Jul 4, 2024

As a customer of Amazon RDS, you don't have super-user privileges, and that is the only drawback where improvements are required.

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GK

Gurudeva Kalledevarpurada B

IT Solution Architect at HCS

Apr 3, 2020

The Amazon RDS engine could provide features for additional databases, such as Db2. It could also provide support for other databases, such as NoSQL databases, DynamoDB, and Apache Cassandra. They could all stay under one hood.

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Lead Data Engineer at Seven Lakes Enterprises, Inc.

Aug 1, 2022

One of the challenges of AWS RDS is that it doesn't support performance insight. So we need to write our own script or use third-party tools.

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Free Report: Amazon RDS Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Amazon RDS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2025.

867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.

SR

Sivashankar Rajaram

Principal engineer at Verizon

Jun 2, 2020

It would be helpful if they made it easier to migrate from an existing on-premises solution to the cloud-based service.

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MA

Owner at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

Oct 1, 2021

The Performance Monitor they have is a little clanky, at least in regards to the UI.

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reviewer2592669

Director Software Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 5, 2025

Amazon RDS is expensive compared to GCP. GCP also has the same features, and although it is quite extensive and feature-rich, I see Amazon RDS as slightly expensive compared to other clouds.

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reviewer1472997

CTO at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

Jan 24, 2021

You can only get access from the sales support. That means if you want to buy something or renew your subscription or upgrade, all these services are easily available. Yet, if you would like to get some technical support, you have to pay for it. You have to pay for an additional subscription.

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reviewer2252781

Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Sep 19, 2023

The only thing that needs improvement would be the pricing of the solution.

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BS

AWS Architect at Virtual University

Jun 4, 2025

User interface needs improvement for using IPS and CloudWatch to scale and utilize read replicas, enabling performance insights to view query formats where the bottlenecks occur, identifying the fixes, slow queries, and missing indexes, improving the security and monitoring with alerts.

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Shaamil Ashraff

Architect - Database Administration at Mitra Innovation

Jun 3, 2022

The solution is a bit expensive.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 54)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

MongoDB Atlas vs Amazon RDS

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs Amazon RDS

Google Cloud SQL vs Amazon RDS

SingleStore vs Amazon RDS

Oracle Database as a Service vs Amazon RDS

Google Cloud Spanner vs Amazon RDS

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Amazon RDS

Azure Database for PostgreSQL vs Amazon RDS

Yugabyte Platform vs Amazon RDS

IBM Db2 on Cloud vs Amazon RDS

IBM Cloudant vs Amazon RDS

ClearDB vs Amazon RDS

ZeusDB vs Amazon RDS

EDB Managed DBaaS Service vs Amazon RDS

See all alternatives

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