8. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)

Overview

• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the AWS Cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks
• Amazon RDS doesn't provide shell access to DB instances.
• Amazon RDS currently supports the MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server DB engines
• You can get high availability with a primary instance and a synchronous secondary instance that you can fail over to when problems occur.
• You can also use MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL read replicas to increase read scaling.

DB instances

•  A DB instance is an isolated database environment in the AWS Cloud.
• Your DB instance can contain multiple user-created databases. 
• Each DB instance runs a DB engine， each DB engine has a set of parameters in a DB parameter group that control the behavior of the databases that it manages.
• You can run your DB instance in several Availability Zones, an option called a Multi-AZ deployment. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from the failure of a single location.
  • When you choose this option, Amazon automatically provisions and maintains a secondary standby DB instance in a different Availability Zone.
  • Your primary DB instance is synchronously replicated across Availability Zones to the secondary instance. 
• A security group controls the access to a DB instance.
• Each DB instance has a DB instance identifier, the DB instance identifier must be unique for that customer in an AWS Region
• The identifier is used as part of the DNS hostname allocated to your instance by RDS.
• The DB instance class determines the computation and memory capacity of an Amazon RDS DB instance.
• Amazon RDS supports three types of instance classes: Standard, Memory Optimized, and Burstable Performance.
• Amazon RDS use Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes for database and log storage

Instance Storage

• DB instance storage comes in three types: Magnetic, General Purpose (SSD), and Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS)
• General Purpose SSD – General Purpose SSD volumes offer cost-effective storage that is ideal for a broad range of workloads
  • Baseline I/O performance for General Purpose SSD storage is 3 IOPS for each GiB, with a minimum of 100 IOPS.
  • This relationship means that larger volumes have better performance.
  • Volumes below 1 TiB in size also have ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS for extended periods of time. Burst is not relevant for volumes above 1 TiB. Instance I/O credit balance determines burst performance.
• Provisioned IOPS – Provisioned IOPS storage is designed to meet the needs of I/O-intensive workloads, particularly database workloads, that require low I/O latency and consistent I/O throughput.
  • Provisioned IOPS storage is optimized for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads that have consistent performance requirements. 
  • When you create a DB instance, you specify the IOPS rate and the size of the volume.
  • The ratio of IOPS to allocated storage (in GiB) must be at least 0.5 (1.0 on RDS for SQL Server) and not more than 50
  • For production OLTP use cases, we recommend that you use Multi-AZ deployments for enhanced fault tolerance with Provisioned IOPS storage for fast and predictable performance.
  • You can also use Provisioned IOPS SSD storage with read replicas for MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL.
• Magnetic – Amazon RDS also supports magnetic storage for backward compatibility. 
  • Doesn't allow you to scale storage when using the SQL Server database engine.
  • Doesn't support storage autoscaling.
  • Doesn't support elastic volumes.
  • Limited to a maximum size of 3 TiB.
  • Limited to a maximum of 1,000 IOPS.
• The following system-related activities consume I/O capacity and might reduce database instance performance while in progress:
  • Multi-AZ standby creation
  • Read replica creation
  • Changing storage types
• Database workload might reduce database instance performance:
  • The throughput limit of the underlying instance type is reached.
  • Queue depth is consistently less than 1 because your application is not driving enough I/O operations.
  • You experience query contention in the database even though some I/O capacity is unused.

Configuring an Amazon RDS DB instance

• You can configure a DB instance with an option group and a DB parameter group.
  • An option group specifies features, called options, that are available for a particular Amazon RDS DB instance.
  • A DB parameter group acts as a container for engine configuration values that are applied to one or more D