AWS Cookbook

Chapter 4. Databases

4.0 Introduction

You have a myriad of choices for using databases with AWS. Installing and running a database on EC2 provides you with the most choices of database engines and custom configurations, but brings about challenges like patching, backups, configuring high-availability, replication, and performance tuning. As noted on its product page, AWS offers managed database services that help address these challenges and cover a broad range of database types (relational, key-value/NoSQL, in-memory, document, wide column, graph, time series, ledger). When choosing a database type and data model, you must keep speed, volume, and access patterns in mind.

The managed database services on AWS integrate with many services to provide you additional functionality from security, operations, and development perspectives. In this chapter, you will explore Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), NoSQL usage with Amazon DynamoDB, and the ways to migrate, secure, and operate these database types at scale. For example, you will learn how to integrate Secrets Manager with an RDS database to automatically rotate database user passwords. You will also learn how to leverage IAM authentication to reduce the application dependency on database passwords entirely, granting access to RDS through IAM permissions instead. You’ll explore autoscaling with DynamoDB and learn about why this is important from a cost and performance perspective.

Note

Some people think that Route 53 is ...