We use Amazon RDS for our Oracle Learning system. About five clients or so use it for that. We also offer a database service using Oracle, Amazon RDS, and Microsoft SQL Server RDS for our rental clients.
Cloud Engineer/ Data Architect at a government with 201-500 employees
It's good for backups, auto-scanning, and disaster recovery
Pros and Cons
- "Amazon RDS is good for backups, auto-scanning, and disaster recovery. It's also appropriate for the office server."
- "AWS support is decent, but it's not as good as before. Sometimes, we get junior staff who are unable to answer our questions. It also depends on the support team you get. Support based in Europe and Australia is better than US support. For example, European support is quick to deliver the right answer. US support handles routine maintenance issues, and it's mostly junior staff who don't know the product well."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
Amazon RDS is good for backups, auto-scanning, and disaster recovery. It's also appropriate for the office server.
What needs improvement?
An RDS account cannot be shared when you close it. You need an encryption key to clone the data, but you cannot share it.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Amazon RDS for more than seven years.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is good.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability is an issue. It doesn't handle large data sets well, so we use a different solution for those. This is a limitation of RDBMs, and data doubles every two years.
How are customer service and support?
AWS support is decent, but it's not as good as before. Sometimes, we get junior staff who are unable to answer our questions. It also depends on the support team you get. Support based in Europe and Australia is better than US support. For example, European support is quick to deliver the right answer. US support handles routine maintenance issues, and it's mostly junior staff who don't know the product well.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We use multiple solutions from various vendors. It's better to compare Amazon RDS to AWS Aura and MySQL. You pay more with Aura, and it cannot handle our scheduled databases.
How was the initial setup?
I rate Amazon RDS nine out of 10 for ease of setup.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Amazon RDS eight out of 10 overall.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Electrical Engineer at Strathmore University
A solution with quick deployment, but the interface could be improved
Pros and Cons
- "The IT is easy to set up, which is the best."
- "Sometimes the interface has many moving parts, which is a concern."
What is our primary use case?
I use this solution because I am trying to develop a fintech application.
How has it helped my organization?
It takes off a load in setting up the VM, infrastructure, software and user accounts that go with databases.
What is most valuable?
I appreciate how Amazon RDS allows me to choose the kind of database I want. The IT is easy to set up, which is the best. It makes it easy to deploy quickly. I initially tried setting up a database on a local machine and realized that several requirements were needed. I needed to do a lot of infrastructure management.
What needs improvement?
Sometimes the interface has many moving parts, which is a concern. For example, the cloud is a virtual network instead of having a dedicated VPC that handles databases, and they have it connected to the VPC that handles the main Amazon infrastructure.
If I had one that was indicated, it would make things easier because there are specific things I need when connecting to ensure accessibility. There is no need for multiple settings, considering a database cannot survive independently. Amazon RDS needs a connection to be a client, so they should tune it a bit more. In addition, uploading and having it done within a short period is challenging.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used this solution for the past seven months, and we use the latest version. It is deployed on the cloud, public AWS.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It has good availability, and so far, we haven't had any issues with it.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We haven't reached the point where we need to scale up for performance or storage. But I don't think manually scaling the discs is easy to do, so it should be able to scale on its own. In addition, the instances can manage the traffic, and there's an option for setting each total scale. So depending on how production goes, we may scale it. We have three people using the solution, including myself. So we need only one person to maintain.
How are customer service and support?
We haven't contacted technical support because we haven't encountered any issues.
How was the initial setup?
I completed the deployment myself. We're using local databases on a local host to test and deploy it.
What was our ROI?
We do not have any return on investment because we are still testing.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I do not have specific details about the pricing, but we use the solution on demand. I rate the pricing a six out of ten, with one being the most expensive and ten being the cheapest. We have to pay extra for monitoring services.
What other advice do I have?
I rate this solution a seven out of ten. Regarding advice, learning from other good consoles and having the basics before approaching them is essential.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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Enterprise Solutions Architect at OORWIN LABS INC
A good product that is easy to deploy, stable, and scalable
Pros and Cons
- "It is stable, scalable, and easy to deploy."
- "Currently, we are using Fargate. Instead of that, we are planning to use EC2 instances, but we are facing some problems, and we are unable to enable NAT gateway for Elastic Load Balancer. When we enable auto-scaling, the instance count increases, and we get IP addresses dynamically. We need to whitelist the IPs of these instances, but there is no option to whitelist those IPs in Amazon RDS. We need one static IP that we can assign to ELB so that we can whitelist this IP."
What is our primary use case?
It's very useful to save customer's data in a secure manner, we can easily handle all the customer records with encryption mode.
How has it helped my organization?
Currently, we are not using RDS as, it has some limitations on DB schema creation, it allows limited tenant DB creations...expecting to release RDS custom RDS very soon
What is most valuable?
It is stable, scalable, and easy to deploy.
What needs improvement?
Expecting to have AWS RDS custom.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for almost four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable. We have more than 12,000 users who are using this solution.
How are customer service and support?
When we depend on the AWS technical team, we need to pay more. For tech support, they are charging about 25% of the actual bill, which is too high for me. If it is fixed to something like $200, I can go for that, but currently, it is too high for me.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Earlier we used Rackspace, it is very costly and more technical depedancy
How was the initial setup?
It is straightforward. It takes only a couple of minutes.
What about the implementation team?
We did it on our own.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Cost always depends on usage
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated azure, but we faced some issues with wild card domains
What other advice do I have?
The product is pretty good, but its support is very expensive.
I would rate it a ten out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Owner at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Great for backups and creating replicas and allows users to change the size of an RDS MySQL instance
Pros and Cons
- "Being able to change the size of an RDS MySQL instance is amazing."
- "The Performance Monitor they have is a little clanky, at least in regards to the UI."
What is our primary use case?
When I was working for at my previous organization, we wanted to bring stability to all our MySQL databases. As a DBA, at first, it was scary as I thought I would be out of a job, however, the RDS managed DB allowed me to focus more on optimization and less on administration. (both hardware and software).
When I was working at another organization we had a large amount of MySQL on-prem to manage. It required lots of time to set them up, monitoring, and maintain them. RDS really allowed us to remove all the painful administration parts.
How has it helped my organization?
Less time was spent maintaining MySQL. Having to configure each server and spinning up a new MySQL in RDS takes 10 to 15min. It's a huge time-saving in maintenance.
By using RDS, AWS takes care of the maintenance of the hardware and software updates. Being able to scale quickly or downsize with no impact is also great.
All of your databases are nicely organized under 1 interface; you have quick access to some monitors and Cloudwatch can be used to set up alerts based on thresholds and notify you.
Today, with Terraform, you can automate the full process of creating RDS servers, deprecating them, changing their size, adding a replica, etc.
What is most valuable?
Create Replicas. Being able to create a replica with just a few clicks is great. Setting replication before would require backup, restore, and synching replication.
Backups. The fact that you can take a snapshot of the database without impacting the server is great. In comparison, large backups could lock tables or take too long. Alternatively, you would have to use tools such as xtraDB backup. That requires lots of code and maintenance.
Change Size. Being able to change the size of an RDS MySQL instance is amazing. There's no need to provision new machines, setup replication, etc. It's all done for you.
What needs improvement?
The solution needs RDS Mysql support for both MySQL 8 and MariaDB.
The Performance Monitor they have is a little clanky, at least in regards to the UI.
I wish they had designed a better MySQL Monitoring solution. I personally like SolarWinds DPA.
The performance is not always as good as MySQL running on its own EC2 instance. I have done some benchmarks before between EC2 instances and RDS and EC2 were better.
Being unable to select Out-file is annoying. They do support select Out-files into S3 but only on Aurora. It would be nice if they had implemented that feature in RDS MySQL.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using AWS RDS for more than 8 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
MySQL RDS is very stable. I cannot say that running MySQL on-premise or on EC2 instances is less stable than RDS MySQL. However, when there are hardware issues, if you have RDS MySQL standby "on", you'll appreciate the fail-over solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
MySQL RDS can scale very well. I have been using it in critical Production services.
How are customer service and support?
AWS Customer Support is pretty good. Their response time is usually adequate. They offer different support options and provide different support media (for example, phone, web, and email).
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I was using MySQL on-prem. I decided to switch due to the amount of time required to maintain on-premises databases.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is fairly straightforward. There is some tuning that needs to be done with RDS. The default settings are not always adequate.
What about the implementation team?
We handled the implementation in-house.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Make sure you provision your MySQL RDS properly. Don't over or under-provision.
Perform some benchmarks before migrating. Migrating to a new system is costly. You don't want to have your data migrated only to realize it performs much worse than before.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I did not evaluate other options. I did evaluate Aurora, however, for the project requirements, it was not needed.
What other advice do I have?
RDS MySQL (and Postgres) are great managed database services. AWS provides a large range of database instance sizes from micro to very large machines. RDS can scale, and creating Replicas is very easy to accomplish.
If you're unsure if you should start using RDS or not, I suggest you consult with a MySQL RDS DBA or Data Architect who has used RDS for several years before making a decision.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Advisory and IT Transformation Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
A stable tool that is easy to deploy and integrate
Pros and Cons
- "I found it to be a stable solution."
- "I feel Amazon RDS should have a lot of functionalities to make monitoring within the database easier."
What is most valuable?
The benefits I experienced while using Amazon RDS stemmed from the fact that it provided me with the database and helped with managing searches in AWS. With Amazon RDS, you have your database without worrying about infrastructure, updates, or other things.
What needs improvement?
The shortcomings stem from not Amazon RDS as a product but are related to its monitoring capabilities. I feel Amazon RDS should have a lot of functionalities to make monitoring within the database easier. Amazon RDS should provide more granularity of log entries.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have had a few years of experience with Amazon RDS. I was a user of the solution.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I found it to be a stable solution.
How are customer service and support?
I never needed the solution's technical support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Amazon RDS was the first tool with which I used databases or services on the cloud.
Currently, I work with Microsoft Azure SQL Database in my new company.
Speaking about Microsoft Azure SQL Database, you would always have the latest version and latest update since Microsoft is the owner of the Microsoft Stack.
How was the initial setup?
Amazon RDS is easy to deploy and integrate, but it depends on the solution. Maybe if you need to restore your database in a different region or in a different account or want to run Amazon RDS databases in multi-account environments, then it can be really hard and painful.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Amazon RDS is an expensive solution.
What other advice do I have?
I would tell those who plan to use Amazon RDS to understand how it works and determine the pricing part before purchasing it since it is expensive.
The ease of using Amazon RDS depends on your platform, design, and software. Amazon RDS is easy to use if you have an AWS infrastructure.
With Amazon RDS, integrations with third-party solutions can be easy and beneficial for the product's monitoring part only. In general, integrating Amazon RDS with third-party solutions can be a complex process.
I rate the overall product an eight and a half out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Business Manager at Darede Serviços de TI
An easy-to-implement solution that allows its users to experience a return on investment by using it
Pros and Cons
- "Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
- "Currently, speaking of Microsoft SQL on RDS, you don't have a full option to be able to use it directly on RDS. So, it needs improvement."
What is our primary use case?
We have a lot of benefits moving to managed services, including Amazon RDS. It is a great service, and we have a lot of cases needing Amazon RDS. So, it is a great product.
How has it helped my organization?
We have some cases where our customers are looking for more performance or simplifying their DR. So, in this way, we have some cases where the customers moved from EC2 using enterprise license to Amazon RDS with less cost or with included standardization. So, we have cases of moving from EC2 to RDS to simplify the management and also simplify the DR strategy.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is how simple it is to implement the solution's multiple phases, and also and also have the DR strategy on Amazon. For me, I think it is a great feature how simple it is to increase the performance of instances running on Amazon RDS.
What needs improvement?
For me, I think that it will be great to have the option to have more SQL or have a deployment allowing for configuring it with a Microsoft SQL server.
Currently, speaking of Microsoft SQL on RDS, you don't have a full option to be able to use it directly on RDS. So, it needs improvement. It will be good to have more solutions with a simple deployment. So being in one region, you should have the option to deploy the solution in another region.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon RDS for three years. Also, I am using the solution's latest version.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
How are customer service and support?
I haven't used the support, but as a partner, I rate the support a ten out of ten since we have a lot of technicians, like solution architects and so on. So the support is great. And we also have feedback from the customers regarding the tech support manager and the support they received. So, overall it is great.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The initial deployment of RDS was straightforward since our teams have experience.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment using the solution.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing of RDS is a little bit high compared to Microsoft. But we know that it is related to Microsoft licenses. However, it is a good price compared to other solutions.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend the solution to others. I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Linux System Administrator at Ergode
A well-managed and stable service while also providing scalability
Pros and Cons
- "Amazon RDS is quite a well-managed and stable service...The initial setup was very easy."
- "There are a few aspects of database management that have room for improvement. There are a few parameters in the solution that are a bit unclear at our end as it's not understandable."
What is our primary use case?
We use it in our organization since it is a managed database service. So we can manage our database within UAM.
How has it helped my organization?
My company decided to use the solution since it is a managed database service that provides control along with a UI for our databases.
What is most valuable?
The performance insight is a valuable feature of the solution since it gives us information on how much data has been and which queries have been taking a long time. Also, it shows the percentage of bin select queries while providing information on how insert queries work, along with the time required for operation and insertion while indicating the performance in sales.
What needs improvement?
There are a few aspects of database management that have room for improvement. There are a few parameters in the solution that are a bit unclear at our end as it's not understandable. So, for queries, they show them as other stuff which is not clearly mentioned. For the legends which they are giving, there should be some other help that could help us with the legends on the graphs.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon RDS for three years. Since it's an AWS service, no one looks after the version. I am a customer of the solution.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's a stable product.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Amazon RDS has been used for major applications, and multiple people work on the applications. So, around 600 people are using RDS to work on applications.
How are customer service and support?
There is no specific technical support for the solution. I rate the support a six out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was very easy.
What other advice do I have?
Everyone should definitely use RDS because it's the next revolutionary solution in the market. A managed database is something that is required.
Amazon RDS is quite a well-managed and stable service, but there are a few parameters that are still unclear from their end.
I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Head Of Information Technology at Bquate Music
High performance, reliable, and straightforward setup
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature of Amazon RDS is its performance."
- "The solution could improve the administration tools."
What is our primary use case?
Amazon RDS helps with information regarding the customer's business performance.
How has it helped my organization?
The solution has helped us have valuable metrics on our customer's business.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of Amazon RDS is its performance.
What needs improvement?
The solution could improve the administration tools.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon RDS for approximately three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of Amazon RDS is good.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We do not have plans to increase the usage of the solution.
How are customer service and support?
I have not used the support from the vendor.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward.
What was our ROI?
We have seen an ROI using the solution.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Amazon RDS is less expensive than other solutions.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Amazon RDS a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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