Data is king, and it does not matter what kind of application you are designing: every application will at one point in processing the data need to store that data in a persistent and reliable way. We have already looked at several different ways of storing data in AWS for several different data types, from objects to block data to files, and we have learned how to use EC2 to provide an operating system where we can install applications such as a database server. But what if we don't have the resources to manage our own database server? Or we just want a simple way to consume a database from the cloud? One way this can be done is by using a managed database service such as the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Introduction to RDS
• RDS engine types
• Best practices for deploying RDS instances
• Changing RDS instance types
• Read replicas
• Sharding data over RDS instances
• Creating and restoring snapshots