Amazon Relational Database Service
The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is Amazon’s managed relational database service. RDS lets you provision a number of popular relational database management systems (RDBMSs) including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
You can always install and configure your own database server on an EC2 instance. But RDS offers several advantages over this. When you create an RDS database instance, Amazon sets up one or more compute instances and takes care of installing and configuring the RDBMS of your choice. These compute instances are not EC2 instances that you can secure shell (SSH) into, but they are connected to a virtual private cloud (VPC) of your choice, allowing your applications running on AWS or on-premises to take full advantage of an RDS-hosted database. Like EC2 instances, RDS instances use Elastic Block Service (EBS) volumes for storage.
To achieve the level of performance and availability you need, you can choose...