Planning your next steps

There are a ton of amazing things that you can do besides the steps that we have covered in this chapter. To begin with, try out encrypting your databases using the Encryption facility provided by RDS itself. RDS encrypts as well as decrypts data without any major impact on your DB instance's performance. The encryption process can only be set up during the DB instance's initial deployment phase, so plan and use the facility before you actually deploy your database. An important point to remember here, though, is that encryption is not supported on the t1.micro instance class. You will have to use the memory optimized (R3) or burst capable (T2) for the same. To know more about how you can use and set up the encryption on your DB instances, refer to http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Overview.Encryption.html.

Besides RDS, AWS also provides a host of other database-related services that you can try out depending on your application's needs. For example...