Amazon RDS Reviews

We have cloud infra and development teams and my job with this solution is to move them to a cloud architecture, so I create a migration plan for Database from on-premises to AWS Cloud , co-ordinate with teams to host the planned RDS solutions and provide support for post cloud hosting challenges for better customer experience. 

Few minutes to launch RDS, DR, HA and monitoring configurations which reduced the administrative task and by the approach of pay for what we use reduced the cost. Performance is good when both Web application and DB are in same cloud. Need to be have In depth understanding of cost, else we are in position to pay more, which makes us to think our own DB is better when cost is very huge amount.  

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.

The fact that it is fully managed has some disadvantages, as well. I have worked on SQL Server, Oracle, and other RDBMS systems for more than 20 years. In many of these cases, I have been an administrator and required administrative privileges to perform many of the tasks that I did. As I now work on a fully managed and maintained database, it is taking me longer to figure out how to perform these same operations that I was used to doing on-premises. Essentially, having a great deal of experience as an RDBMS administrator has made it harder for me to move forward when working on a database that is fully managed. It would be helpful if they made it easier to migrate from an existing on-premises solution to the cloud-based service.

Technical support could use some improvement.

I have been using Amazon RDS for five years.

The stability of this solution is good. We did have a couple of problems last year when the database was absconded, but luckily we had snapshots available. They take six backups daily and we were able to easily restore. We did not suffer any data loss.

I make use of this solution on a daily basis, especially over the past few years. We are migrating and I do work on the on-premises data centers, which is our core area. But, from a cost perspective, we are working towards hosting our business entirely in AWS.

The scalability of Amazon RDS is very good.

We have between 5,000 and 6,000 users.

We have contacted technical support over several issues and use cases. We build a use case and they suggest solutions. I do like them, but each use case is different and I have seen a lot of room for them to improve over time.

We initially deployed Amazon RDS on-premises, although we are now migrating to cloud-based deployment. Spinning up a task is very easy and there is no maintenance. There are no administrative tasks involved for us because it is entirely taken care of. This includes monitoring and backup, as well.

The length of time for deployment depends on the size of the database. If they say it is one gigabyte then it will take a few minutes.

We have technical people who are certified and handle the deployment in-house.

Good amount of cost reduction in cloud but we need to have well defined monitoring rules to save cost even after hosted in cloud. You can scale-up and scale-down with minimal duration compare to on-prem DB Servers. Which add more cost benefits. 

We can BYOL (Bring Your Own License), if you already purchased for Microsoft SQL Server or for Oracle and use that during RDS launch. 

If you need to reduce licensing cost in database , we can migrate to 3 open source databases in AWS RDS : MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB.

Amazon Aurora RDS , which is compatible to MySQL Engine and PostgreSQL Engine can be used to get most benefit of RDS managed service with performance and cost since it is AWS native RDS.

We have reached the stage where all of our critical applications are hosted on-premises, and the rest is hosted with a public cloud provider. We found that at one stage, it was more advantageous to store some of our core data in our own data centers and have the rest managed.

My advice for people who are implementing this solution is to keep in mind that they need to redefine their product. It is not just a copy of an on-premises solution. Rather, it is designed with cloud architecture in mind. We use the term Cloud Adaptiveness. This means that before moving, they need to make sure that the architect of that application, the business owner, and the database administrator all realize that they are going to be migrating to the cloud. They will need to make some modifications before it happens. Otherwise, if they try to do it post-migration, it will be more difficult.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The primary use case is when you have to host your application on the Amazon cloud and your application uses database. Amazon RDS supports the following database engines: Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server database. Amazon provides AWS Database Migration Service to migrate your existing databases to the Amazon cloud. It automates many aspects of database management viz hardware provisioning, database set up, database patching, and backups, which frees your database administrator to focus on important tasks. It also saves on the DB licencing costs.

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. 

It is also secure. You can build your own VPC and host the database inside it, which will produce robust security. You still need to follow the principles of security as highlighted by Amazon. 

Most useful is its availability to support multiple databases, such as Aurora, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, MariaDB, and PostgresSQL. Your application can use multiple databases as required. Combine that with the Automated CI/CD tools, this makes it easy to implement the microservices architecture, which is the need of the hour for web based applications. The capability provided by the RDS to automate a portion of the RDBMS tasks, such as backups and performance tunings for multiple database engines, helps to save on DBA time and cost.

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.

Another improvement that Amazon could do is to market their product so that more customers can use it. With Microsoft having its own cloud Azure hosting SQL Server databases and Oracle coming up with its own cloud, there appears to be more competition. As more customers move to Amazon cloud, it will increase the utilization of the RDS, then more customers will be able to harness the power of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).

I have been using this solution since 2015 on my consulting projects with a variety of clients.

This Solution is very stable, as many customers have witnessed. Responsibility to set up the Amazon VPC, servers, and RDS does take work. This requires a solid AWS (infrastructure): Administrators and networking team. They need to work with the AWS team, following the stringent security guidelines that will help to build stability for the solution. 

Amazon Web Services is built for scalability. RDS is designed with scalability in mind.

It is available. You need to negotiate and engage their services.

Earlier, we were using traditional on-prem databases. The need to switch to Amazon RDS has been due to a variety of factors. One such factor is the need to move the existing applications in our data center with variable demand utilization and pre-installed servers and databases to applications migrated to Amazon Web Services cloud. Along with migrating applications on servers, we also need to migrate databases. With the added power of supporting multiple database engines as well as automating many functions of DBAs and releasing the DBAs to focus on essential tasks, this has made it easier to switch to Amazon RDS.

The initial setup will be complex. You and your team need to understand the complexities of setting up IAM, security groups, AMIs, VPCs, autoscaling/loadbalancing, and RDS, then plan for multiple availability zones for disaster and recovery. You also need to set up an infrastructure admin and infrastructure support team who will work closely with the AWS team. You do not want your entire development to get involved with setting up the infrastructure. Your administrators and infrastructure team need to set it up, then guide the development team on how to utilize the infrastructure.

The initial vendor team could help to set up the infrastructure, team organization, etc. Then, your in-house team can carry out the administration and support work as well as the day-to-day tasks, such as providing access, helping developers make changes, uploading to the infrastructure, performing the migration, deployment, etc. The vendor team needs to have certified, experienced consultants to set up the infrastructure.

Work with Amazon Pre-Sales team and have them present their products to your organization. They will help you to arrive at building a business case, PoCs, SLAs, contracts, etc. You will also need to set up a product support team along with the migration, deployment, and core AWS Infrastructure Administrator teams who will be essential to the success of the project.

This is where the product stands apart. You do not need to set up thousands of servers, hundreds of database, and hundreds of DBAs. You need to set up a minimal infrastructure. There is no need to pay upfront the cost of an entire data center. It is pay as-you-go. Therefore, you realize the benefits and scale up/down as needed. Amazon will provide the required capacity. This will help you to realize the ROI quickly, which helps you to keep on growing.

This has helped reduce the cost at the same time increasing the agility of the organization. Some thing which would have costed millions of dollars and nine DBAs could easily be replaced by Amazon RDS.

By using a combination of Reserve Instances and On-Demand pricing, you can reduce the cost.

The main reason to migrate to the cloud comes from moving the underutilized. Variable demand applications moving to the cloud benefit from a cost savings as well as when they move from data center maintenance to building the core business capabilities. The application migration and database migration to AWS also provides an added advantage.

For new/existing customers building new products, such as Ola, Uber, or Swiggy, instead of building their own data center first and launching the product which involves massive costs, AWS offers a better quality solution if they are unsure about whether their product will succeed in the market. They can build the product, start making money, and utilize the pay-as-you-go model. Then, they can scale the product depending on demand utilization. That appears to be the best business case for Amazon Web Services.

RDS provides deployment agility and an on-demand database-as-a-service for MySQL, Oracle, and SQL servers.

With RDS, everything is turnkey and always available. For example, due to the inherent multi-availability zone feature of AWS, there is no downtime at all and you can count on AWS RDS to always be available.

For many of the Pythian customers, one salient benefit, among other benefits, is the option of spinning up a new instance whenever it is needed. Now it can be done with a few clicks, without much ado.

RDS doesn't have shell access. This could be beneficial, especially for Oracle databases.

One benefit of having shell access with RDS is that DBAs or developers could keep their own existing scripts. Especially in the case of non-enterprise versions, there is always a need to dig into performance issues and their troubleshooting. So shell access could be very handy in that case and in some other cases.

I have been using AWS RDS for the last two years.

We have not really had stability issues.

The technical support is good and prompt.

For many clients of Pythian, it’s an amalgamation of on-premises and cloud. Pythian enables its customers to reap the benefits of both worlds.

With the expertise and experience of Pythian, the initial setup was a breeze.

Read the fine print carefully and always engage experts to carry out migration.

We did not evaluate any alternatives.

Having your database on RDS doesn't mean that you don't need a DBA anymore. Mission critical and important databases must be handled by a DBA, even if the database resides on the cloud, like RDS.

• Easy creation of new databases
• Maintenance is fully automatic (backups, monitoring, and patches)

We are using it as shared QA environment.

Migration to RDS using the default tools is very complicated.

I have used this product for one year.

We have not had stability problems. It is much more stable than a standard datacenter.

This had the same scalability issues as Oracle databases on premise.

We have never needed technical support.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was very simple.

I am using BYOL.

We evaluated Oracle database on-premises on Amazon EC2 and on Oracle Cloud.

It requires time to adapt to the idea that you do not have any access to the O/S.

Amazon RDS is primarily for web applications.

The solution is good for on-premise deployments.

The solution could improve by adding a sandbox environment and more security.

I have been using Amazon RDS for approximately one year.

I rate the stability of Amazon RDS a five out of ten.

I plan to increase the usage of this solution.

I rate the scalability of Amazon RDS a five out of ten.

I rate the stability of Amazon RDS a nine out of ten.

Positive

The setup of Amazon RDS was complex.

I have received a return on investment using the solution.

The price of Amazon RDS is reasonable.

I rate Amazon RDS a ten out of ten.

We use it for data warehousing and transforming data.

One of the most valuable features is that it is serverless, so we don't have to worry about scaling.

We don't have control over tweaking the database parameters, so we switched to Aurora.

In the next release, it would be great to have access to core parameters to improve or tweak the performance.

I have been using it for five years. 

I would give it a nine because it's a reliable and cost-effective solution.

It is used for multiple needs. We have a transaction system with multiple databases, such as SQL Server and MySQL.

It is easy to use, flexible, and powerful.

When you are using it for the first time, it is a little bit hard to configure. The first-time configuration is not very easy. It should be easier to configure.

Its installation should also be simpler. Currently, its installation is very complex.

With SQL Server, we have access to the SQL Server analysis services and reporting services, but such services are not available with Amazon RDS.

I have been using this solution for a couple of months.

It is stable.

We have around ten users of this solution. We plan to keep using this solution.

I have not interacted with them.

Its installation is very complex. It takes one whole day.

I did it with the help of someone else. We have three or four people for deployment and maintenance.

It is less expensive than SQL Server. We pay based on the usage on a monthly basis.

I would rate Amazon RDS an eight out of ten.