What is our primary use case?
We are working mostly with the infrastructure being totally on AWS, so we are using AWS services, RDS, MySQL, Postgres, all the databases, mostly Oracle, and then Databricks and Snowflake. We are into using only cloud-native services, not any other software.
In terms of the main use cases, we are working in a product company that is heavily into the intellectual property domain data. We basically acquire data from various patent offices and provide the data as a service on top of that to various clients. We are using AWS and RDS for storage of all this metadata and churning out some important information out of that by applying certain transformations on top of this data.
What is most valuable?
The biggest advantage of Amazon RDS, which is basically an AWS service, is that you can customize it. Amazon RDS is your RDBMS on AWS. For example, if you want to have MySQL or if you want to have Postgres, those RDBMS on AWS, then you need to go with Amazon RDS. When you configure Amazon RDS, you choose which RDBMS software you want to install on that, be it Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, etc.
We are using automated data backup in Amazon RDS.
In some cases, we are using the read replica feature, and it does improve our application performance because we do not allow any downstream system to come to the main storage or main databases and perform a query. Rather, we create the replica, which is a downstream system that keeps updating from the main database. We open the replica for the downstream systems to perform any heavy queries on the data rather than giving direct access to the database.
What needs improvement?
I don't really see any disadvantages of Amazon RDS. With Oracle, I think AWS doesn't provide the RAC stability. If you have Oracle installed in your own data centers, you can set up various clusters and we can set up the RACs, but in Amazon RDS, we cannot have the RAC feature of Oracle. They could add that feature.
Amazon RDS has limitations regarding RAC. If we talk about installing Oracle in RDS, we cannot have the RAC, but if you deploy Oracle on GCP, then there is probably the RAC feature available. I observed that around two or three years back, but I'm not sure whether they have added the RAC feature in AWS.
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Amazon RDS is quite stable, and the SLAs are sort of 99.98%.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The installation of Amazon RDS is quite easy and quite scalable. We are using Terraform for all infrastructure deployments, so we build the Terraform, deploy it, and it spins up the RDS with the provided features and securities in templates.
How are customer service and support?
The support from AWS is excellent and very good.
I would rate the support from AWS very high, maybe nine, but it also depends on what kind of support you have signed in your contract, whether the premium support or the standard support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
What other advice do I have?
The integration of Amazon RDS with AWS IAM is pretty simple and does positively affect our data security.
I am not heavy into AWS because we have a separate team for that, which is the cloud engineering and cloud architects, so they take care of all that stuff. We have the Multi-AZ availability zones and we also have the DR sites.
I do not really work with Microsoft products overall, but I have worked on the Power BI in terms of the BI products, but not on other Microsoft products.
I won't rate myself an expert on AWS. Although I have worked on AWS, there are different teams, the architects team and engineering teams in AWS, whereas I'm from the application side.
My email is Vishal.Goyal@Clarivate.com, and my job title is Director of Software Engineering.
On a scale of one to ten, I rate Amazon RDS a nine.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)