New Training: Supporting Amazon RDS Databases

In this 1-video skill, CBT Nuggets trainer Bart Castle covers common deployment, monitoring, maintenance, and optimization tasks for Amazon RDS Databases. Gain an understanding of key configurable components, processes, and other AWS complimentary management service for supporting RDS instances. Watch this new AWS training.

Watch the full course: Amazon Relational Database Service

This training includes:

• 1 videos

• 1 minutes of training

You’ll learn these topics in this skill:

• Supporting Amazon RDS Databases

How AWS RDS Helps Control Cost Spending

Comments from edits: Would like to see this one re-written to clarify what is meant by “autoscaling” your databases for you. RDS does not support horizontal scaling or even automated vertical scaling. At best it can tell you to do X, Y, Z but you still have to plan for that change on your own.

Amazon's AWS RDS cloud SQL database, though mostly self-maintained, has many tools available for clients to help manage their services. One of the many tools AWS RDS has is a tool to both automate and manage cost spending for RDS instances. Here is why that's important.

Most cloud apps will have a lifecycle they naturally progress through. First, usage will be low and predictable. That usage will steadily increase over time. Eventually, usage will take-off and climb until that cloud app plateaus and reaches its critical mass. This usage trend is shaped like a hockey stick, but typically it's not known when that usage turns and spikes.

That kind of operation could impose complications with scalability and cost. Developers won't want to throw un-needed resources at a web app. That could incur extra costs. Likewise, software engineers don't want to provision too few resources for their applications. That could induce downtime and poor app performance.

Tools AWS provides helps analyze current and future costs. With these tools, database admins can adjust RDS based on projected usage, and in the event of that eventual rapid growth, reliably predict what that cost of scaling will be. Should that time come that usage spikes drastically, Amazon can send alerts and notifications for current expenditures as well as prevent bills from exceeding budgets without intervention.