Data layer

It's safe to say that most web applications today have some data store, whether it's a relational database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLServer, and so on), a non-relational database (MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, and so on), or even static file storage (S3, OS filesystem, and so on).

AWS RDS service will manage aPostgreSQL database for our coffee cupping application. RDS offers different RDBMS choices, most notably PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and SQLServer. There are other choices, and I encourage you to take a look at the various offerings. For this exercise, we'll be using a standard PostgreSQL database hosted on RDS. Many configuration options come with RDS, which we won't cover. Just know that it's possible and quite simple to run, configure, and manage a high-availability RDBMS instance using RDS. Other PaaS providers offer similar services for relational databases.