First allow me to start with how excited I am to have made it to the 100th post on this site! It’s been over a year since I’ve started and I’ve felt I learned a lot and this site has been a big part of it. Now onto the information! The Relational Database Service, or RDS, is an AWS provided managed service that provides SQL database storage for you to utilize. It supports Postgres, MySQL, Oracle DB, Maria DB, and MS SQL server, as well as Aurora which is a proprietary offering I will go into more depth in on a later post. Now why would you use RDS over simply downloading a DB directly on an EC2 instance? Well the RDS service incorporates additional features such as continuous backups, monitoring dashboards, maintenance windows for upgrades, and read replicas which take the load off your DB by creating a read only copy in the same AZ, a different AZ, or even another region that answers read only queries or it can take place of the primary RDS when it is under a maintenance window. I should note for read replicas cross AZ traffic is not charged, but cross region is. You have a total of 15 read replicas that you can create and all of these will synchronize with the main RDS. Next up you have the RDS auto scaling feature, you set a max storage threshold and if your free storage space is less than 10% of the allocated space, the low storage lasts for longer than 5 minutes, and it’s been 6 hours since the last automatic storage modification then the storage will be increased. This is particularly useful for database storage that tends to be unpredictable.