Simplified Deployments Through Managed Services

Building and administrating software applications can be complex wherever you deploy them. Whether they’re on-premises or in the cloud, you’ll face a lot of moving parts existing in a universe where they all have to play nicely together or the whole thing can collapse. To help lower the bar for entry into the cloud, some AWS services will handle much of the underlying infrastructure for you, allowing you to focus on your application needs. The benefits of a managed service are sometimes offset by premium pricing. But it’s often well worth it.

One important example of such a managed service is the Relational Database Service (RDS). RDS, as you’ll see in Chapter 9, “The Core Database Services,” lets you set the basic configuration parameters for the database engine of your choice, gives you an endpoint address through which your applications can connect to the database, and takes care of all the details...