Bagusflyer
Bagusflyer

Reputation: 12915

Why should I use AWS RDS?

I installed a LAMP stack in my AWS EC2 instances so that I can use the MySQL server. Somebody recommended using RDS. But RDS is not free and also a MySQL server. My question is what makes RDS so special comparing with my MySQL server in EC2 instances?

Thanks. By the way, I'm quite new to AWS.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1393

Answers (1)

alkar
alkar

Reputation: 5511

RDS is a managed solution. Which means, AWS staff will take care of:

  • Patches
  • Backups
  • Maintenance
  • Making sure it's alive

Hosting your database in a second EC2 instance means that:

  • You have to manage everything of the above

Using a LAMP stack and co-hosting Apache and MySQL is the cheapest, but:

  • You have to manage everything of the above
  • You're probably hosting a database on an instance exposed to the internet

That said, if you're planning to host a production website / service that's more than a personal website / blog / experiment you'll probably need to host webserver and database in different instances. Picking RDS is less of a headache.

For anything thats not that important, a LAMP stack makes more sense. Less scalability, potentially less security but also less administrative overhead and costs.

Upvotes: 7

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