Amazon RDS features

Amazon RDS offers a choice of two different storage types. For most use cases, General Purpose storage will work for your database workloads. This is an SSD-backed storage option that delivers a consistent baseline of 3 IOPS per provisioned GB and provides the ability to burst up to 3,000 IOPS above the baseline.

For workloads that require higher performance, Amazon RDS offers Provisioned IOPS storage, which is an SSD-backed storage option designed to deliver fast, predictable, and consistent I/O performance. You can specify an IOPS rate when creating a database instance, and Amazon RDS provisions that IOPS rate for the lifetime of the database instance. This storage type is optimized for I/O-intensive transactional (OLTP) database workloads. You can provision up to 256,000 IOPS per database instance, although your actual realized IOPS may vary based on your database workload, instance type, and database engine choice.

To accelerate the performance of your Amazon RDS database and applications, you can add a cache from ElastiCache, a managed, in-memory caching service, to your database directly from the Amazon RDS console. Together, they can effectively deliver real-time performance of your applications and database needs. Visit the how to create an ElastiCache cluster in Amazon RDS and Aurora documentation pages to learn more.

DevOps Guru is a cloud operations service ML that helps improve application availability. With DevOps Guru for RDS, you can use ML-powered insights to help easily detect and diagnose performance-related relational database issues and is designed to resolve them in minutes rather than days. Developers and DevOps engineers can use DevOps Guru for RDS to automatically identify the root cause of performance issues and get intelligent recommendations to help address the issue, without needing help from database experts.

To get started, simply go to the Amazon RDS console and enable Amazon RDS Performance Insights. Once Performance Insights is on, go to the DevOps Guru console and enable it for your Aurora resources, other supported resources, or your entire account.

Amazon RDS Optimized Writes, built on top of the new AWS Nitro System Torn Write Prevention feature, allows you to improve write transaction throughput by up to 2x at no additional cost. Optimized Writes safely writes your 16KiB data pages in a single step. Optimized Writes is especially useful for customers with write-intensive database workloads, such as digital payments, financial trading, and online gaming.

Amazon RDS Optimized Reads is designed to provide you with faster database performance with up to 2x faster query processing at no additional cost. Optimized Reads improves the speed of your complex queries that use temporary tables, such as queries that require sorts, hash aggregations, high-load joins, and Common Table Expressions (CTEs). Optimized Reads improves the speed of your queries by placing the temporary tables on your NVMe-based instance storage, which is physically connected to your host server.

The automated backup feature in Amazon RDS enables point-in-time recovery for your database instance. Amazon RDS will back up your database and transaction logs and store both for a user-specified retention period. This allows you to restore your database instance to any second during your retention period, up to the last 5 minutes. Your automatic backup retention period can be configured to up to 35 days.

Database snapshots are user-initiated backups of your instances stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) that are kept until you explicitly delete them. You can create a new instance from a database snapshot whenever you desire. Although database snapshots serve operationally as full backups, you are billed only for incremental storage use.

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments provide enhanced availability and durability for database instances with a SLA of up to 99.95%, making them a natural fit for production database workloads. When you provision a Multi-AZ database instance, Amazon RDS synchronously replicates your data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ).

With Multi-AZ with two readable standbys, customers can deploy one primary and two readable standby instances across three AZs. Customers can use this deployment option to receive benefits such as failovers in typically under 35 seconds, up to 2x faster transaction commit latency compared to Amazon RDS Multi-AZ with one standby, and additional read capacity.

When you attach an open source or Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Proxy to your Multi-AZ with two readable standbys deployed, you can reduce minor version upgrade downtime to typically one second. 

With Aurora, you can achieve high availability with an SLA of up to 99.99% using Amazon RDS Multi-AZ technology to automate failover to one of up to 15 Aurora replicas you have created in any three AZs.

Combined with Multi-AZ, cross-Region read replicas can increase resiliency and performance by asynchronously replicating data across Regions, as part of an effective disaster recovery solution.

Aurora Global Database enables fast local reads and quick disaster recovery across multiple AWS Regions from a single Aurora database. Aurora Global Database offers latency of less than 1 second and, in the event of a Regional degradation or outage, can be promoted to a secondary Region in less than 1 minute. Aurora Global Database is ideal for globally distributed workloads that have strict availability requirements, such as in the financial, travel, and gaming industries.

Amazon RDS allows you to encrypt your databases using keys you manage through AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). On a database instance running with Amazon RDS encryption, data stored at rest in the underlying storage is encrypted, as are its automated backups, read replicas, and snapshots.

Amazon RDS supports the use of SSL to secure data in transit, as well Transparent Data Encryption in SQL Server and Oracle.

AWS recommends that you run your database instances in Amazon VPC, which allows you to isolate your database in your own virtual network and connect to your on-premises IT infrastructure using industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPNs. You can configure firewall settings and control network access to your database instances.

Amazon RDS supports several ways to authenticate users, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Kerberos.

Amazon RDS is integrated with IAM and provides you the ability to control the actions that your AWS IAM users and groups can take on specific Amazon RDS resources, from database instances through snapshots, parameter groups, and option groups. You can also tag your Amazon RDS resources and control the actions that your IAM users and groups can take on groups of resources that have the same tag and associated value.

For example, you can configure your IAM rules to ensure developers are able to modify "Development" database instances, but only database administrators can make changes to "Production" database instances.

With Kerberos authentication, your Amazon RDS database works with AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory to authenticate and centrally manage credentials. For Amazon RDS for SQL Server, you have the choice of going through AWS Managed Microsoft AD or joining your database directly to your self-managed AD.

Amazon RDS supports compliance programs, including HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC, and ISO. Visit the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program for the latest list of supported programs.

GuardDuty is available with Aurora to monitor for potential threats to your database and workloads. With Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection, this feature analyzes and profiles database login activity for suspicious behavior. When a threat is detected, GuardDuty generates detailed security findings of the compromised database.

As your storage requirements grow, you can also provision additional storage. The Aurora engine will automatically grow the size of your database volume as your database storage needs grow, up to a maximum of 128 TiB or a maximum you define. The RDS for MySQL, RDS for MariaDB, RDS for Oracle, and RDS for PostgreSQL engines allow you to scale up to 64 TiB of storage and RDS for SQL Server supports up to 16 TiB. Storage scaling is on the fly with zero downtime.

Amazon RDS Read Replicas make it easier to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads. You can create one or more replicas of a given source DB instance and serve high-volume application read traffic from multiple copies of your data, thereby increasing aggregate read throughput.

With Amazon RDS Proxy, you can improve database efficiency and make your applications more scalable, secure, and resilient to database failures by allowing applications to pool and share connections with the database. When failovers occur, Amazon RDS Proxy can reduce failover times by up to 66% for Aurora and Amazon RDS. In addition, you can centrally manage your database credentials, authentication, and access through integration with AWS Secrets Manager and IAM.

Aurora Serverless is a configuration for Aurora that is on demand and provides autoscaling capabilities. With this deployment option, your database automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales capacity up or down based on your application's needs.

There is no upfront commitment with Amazon RDS; you simply pay a monthly charge for each database instance that you launch. And, when you’re finished with a database instance, you can easily delete it. To see more details, visit the Amazon RDS instance types page and the Amazon RDS pricing page.

Reserved Instances in Amazon RDS give you the option to reserve a DB instance for a 1- or 3-year term and receive a significant discount compared to On-Demand Instance pricing for the same instance.

Amazon RDS allows you to easily stop and start your database instances for up to 7 days at a time. This makes it easier and affordable to use databases for development and test purposes, where the database is not required to be running all of the time.

Aurora is designed to offer cost-effective pricing for most applications with low to moderate I/O usage. For I/O-intensive workloads, you can choose Aurora I/O-Optimized, a database cluster configuration, to improve price performance.

With the AWS Free Tier, you can get started with Amazon RDS for free on select single-AZ instance databases up to 750 hours per month, 20 GB of General Purpose SSD storage (gp2) per month, and 20 GB of automated database backup storage per month for 1 year. To learn more, go to Amazon RDS Free Tier.

For commercial engines, Amazon RDS offers several licensing models: Bring Your Own License (BYOL), Bring Your Own Media (BYOM), License Included (LI), or licensing through the AWS Marketlace. With BYOL and BYOM, you can take advantage of your existing commercial software license to use with Amazon RDS. With LI, the cost of the software license is included in the Amazon RDS instance pricing. You do not need to purchase a license separately. With licensing through the AWS Marketplace, you can subscribe to licenses on demand at an hourly rate per core, and you do not need to purchase a license separately.

For more details on the licensing options available by engine, please visit the Amazon RDS for Oracle, Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Amazon RDS for Db2, and Amazon RDS Custom pricing pages.

TLE for PostgreSQL is a development kit and open source project that allows you to quickly build high performance extensions and safely run them on Aurora and Amazon RDS without needing AWS to certify code. Developers can use popular trusted languages—like JavaScript, PL/pgSQL, Perl, and SQL—to safely write extensions.

TLE is designed to prevent access to unsafe resources and limits extension defects to a single database connection. Database administrators (DBAs) have fine-grained, online control over who can install extensions and can create a permissions model for running them. TLE is available to Aurora and Amazon RDS customers at no additional cost.

With Aurora ML, you can add ML-based predictions to applications through the familiar SQL programming language. You can get access to a wide selection of ML algorithms with a simple, secure, and optimized integration with AWS ML services.

With Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, you can use pgvector, an open source PostgreSQL extension, to perform vector similarity searches. You can also store embeddings from ML and AI models in your database, such as those from Amazon Bedrock or Amazon SageMaker.

An embedding is a numerical representation (vector) that represents the semantic meaning of content such as text, images, and video. Generative AI and other AI/ML systems use embeddings to capture the semantic meaning of text input into a large language model (LLM). Read our documentation on how to store embeddings and perform vector similarity searches on Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.

Amazon RDS offers the flexibility and scalability to quickly adjust to your database needs. In one step, you can scale your database compute resources up or down, or with a few steps in the console, you can spin up a new database instance.

Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure and services to any on-premises or co-location for a hybrid experience.

With Amazon RDS on Outposts, you can run Amazon RDS on premises and receive the same features and benefits of Amazon RDS as you would in the cloud, including automated administrative tasks.

Amazon RDS Custom is a managed database service that gives you privileged access to the underlying operating system and database environment to run packaged, custom, and legacy applications for Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. It’s a shared responsibility model in exchange for more flexibility.

With Amazon RDS, you can use AWS DMS, a managed migration and replication service for database and analytics workloads, to perform both homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations. With key features like AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) Fleet Advisor and AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) Schema Conversion, you can discover, plan, convert, and migrate your workloads all within AWS DMS. With AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) Serverless and built-in native tooling, migrations are even easier, as you no longer need to manually provision, manage, and scale migration resources.

Unlike homogeneous migrations, heterogeneous migrations require a schema conversion to ensure the source schema is compatible with the new target engine. For heterogeneous migrations to Amazon RDS, AWS DMS offers built-in capabilities with AWS DMS Schema Conversion, or the option to download AWS SCT software to run locally.

For homogeneous migrations, you can also use familiar native database migration tools to migrate workloads to AWS. Below are documentation links on how to get started:

Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL allows you to run Microsoft SQL Server applications on Aurora PostgreSQL with minimal code changes. As a built-in capability of Aurora, Babelfish enables Aurora PostgreSQL to understand T-SQL, making it simpler and faster to migrate your applications.

With the Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon RDS for MySQL, you can access the latest major and minor MySQL versions and the associated community capabilities and features, such as JSON functions, common table expressions using the WITH clause, optimized ADD COLUMN and RENAME COLUMN clauses for the ALTER TABLE statement, and more.

For a comprehensive list of supported MySQL versions and capabilities, see the Aurora and Amazon RDS documentation.

With Amazon RDS for MariaDB, you can access the latest major and minor MariaDB versions and the associated community capabilities and features. This includes access to the MyRocks Storage engine to optimize storage consumption of write-intensive, high-performance web applications. Other enhancements include delayed replication, Oracle PL/SQL compatibility, and Atomic DDL.

For information on the latest available versions and capabilities, see the Amazon RDS documentation.

With Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, you can access the latest major and minor PostgreSQL versions and the associated community capabilities and features.

For example, you can use PostGIS as a spatial extender for PostgreSQL object-relational databases and add support for geographic objects to run location queries in SQL. You can access various procedural languages, including Perl, pgSQL, TCL, JavaScript (with the V8 JavaScript engine), and Rust (RDS for PostgreSQL only). You can use community extensions, such as pg_stat_statements or postgres_fdw for foreign data wrappers.

Features include PostgreSQL’s support for the JSON data type and two JSON functions. These allow the return of JSON directly from the database server. PostgreSQL has an extension that implements the hstore data type for storing sets of key-value pairs within a single PostgreSQL value. For a comprehensive list of core PostgreSQL engine features, see the PostgreSQL core engine feature list.

With Amazon RDS for Oracle, you can enable Oracle Database options, like Oracle Application Express (APEX), Oracle On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP), and Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM), by adding them to an option group and associating it with your database instance. You can also use third-party products like Oracle GoldenGate with Amazon RDS for Oracle to collect, replicate, and manage transactional data between databases for active-active database replication, disaster recovery, and more.

With Amazon RDS for SQL Server, you can enable SQL Server database options, like linked servers, Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC), SQL Server audit, and the SQL Server Business Intelligence suite (SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS), by adding them to an option group associated with your database instance.

Your use of this service is subject to the AWS Customer Agreement.

What is Amazon RDS used for?

Amazon RDS is a relational database that is used to store, organize, and provide access to related data for data analysis, modeling, reporting, and other business use cases.

What are the advantages of Amazon RDS?

Amazon RDS advantages include its proven performance as a fully managed, cost-effective relational database with the highest standards of security. For over a decade, customers have trusted Amazon RDS for its high availability, durability, scalability, and security to support their mission-critical workloads in the cloud. Whether new to the cloud or an expert, customers appreciate how simple it is to get started and manage Amazon RDS.

What benefits does a database administrator obtain by using Amazon RDS?

Amazon RDS frees up time for DBAs to focus on innovation and driving business value. Amazon RDS automates the undifferentiated administrative tasks of managing a database, such as provisioning, patching, and backups. Amazon RDS also offers cost-effective features to support high availability, performance, and security to meet the demands of your most mission-critical workloads, such as Multi-AZ, Reserved Instances, and permission control through AWS IAM.

Which type of database is Amazon RDS?

Amazon RDS is a relational (or SQL) database.

Which database engines are supported by Amazon RDS?

Amazon RDS supports eight database engines, which include five open-source and three commercial engines. Open-source engines consist of Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition, Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS for MySQL, and Amazon RDS for MariaDB. Commercial engines consist of Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Amazon RDS for Oracle, and Amazon RDS for Db2.

What are the benefits of moving an on-premises database to Amazon RDS?

A key benefit of Amazon RDS is the reduced administrative overhead of self-managing databases on premises. Amazon RDS is easy to use and takes away the undifferentiated administrative burden of provisioning, patching, backups, and more. In addition, Amazon RDS offers the flexibility and choice of features to deliver the performance, scalability, availability, and security needs of our customers.

How do I set up Amazon RDS?

Amazon RDS can be set up with in a few simple clicks in the console. Go to Amazon RDS documentation and follow the set up instructions.

Visit the Amazon RDS documentation or feature-specific pages from the Amazon RDS Features dropdown menu, such as the Amazon RDS Multi-AZ page. In addition, you can find additional features FAQs on the engine-specific FAQ pages: Aurora, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for MariaDB, Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Amazon RDS for Oracle, and Amazon RDS for Db2.

This table highlights Amazon RDS benefits and features of Amazon RDS by engine. Please note this table is not a comprehensive list of available capabilities. To learn more about our fastest-growing service, please visit the Aurora features page.