RDS is a managed service that is able to provide a highly scalable and high-performance relational database backend to your applications. All RDS instances are backed by SSD disks and the latest-generation instance types. It is easily scalable both in size and performance and it has built-in features that allow you to create highly available synchronous and asynchronous replicas to be used as fail-over or read replicas. The environment also offers very high data durability by enabling automated and manual snapshots of the database instances to be taken to provide a backup of your data. All snapshots are stored to S3 and are inherently as durable as the S3 service. RDS seamlessly integrates with the AWS monitoring and auditing tools to provide a complete overview of performance and the state of your database environment.