Does it make senesce to use Amazon RDS with app hosted on other managed hosting service (not amazon)

Question

I am developing a mobile app and I am now getting to the stage where I want to put all my back-end server code online for the production version (I actually want to release my app). The back-end consists of 2 parts:

• MySQL Database
• Actual PHP files for app access.

Looking for a service that is popular, highly scaleable and proven, I came across Amazon Web Services. Now while RDS seemed very straight forward to use for the database part, EC2 was way too complicated for me and I decided on using a managed solution, which puts it out of the question.

Seeing as the simple PHP pages could be moved easily to any service at any time (unlike the database which is a bit harder to move with no downtime), I have decided to use a much cheaper solution for the time being for the PHP pages.

My Question is: Does it make senesce to use Amazon RDS with app hosted on other managed service (rackspace, azure, godaddy etc...)?

Answer 1

While it is technically possible, it depends on your application if it is generally okay to do so. Keep in mind that there will be extra delay in the communication between the RDS instance and your server - and this will happen with every database request you do. You can for example check the network latency with simple tools like ping or traceroute. In general you are looking for the lowest latency possible for database queries.

However if your app hardly does any reads from the database, this could work. If not, I would strongly advise against this. In this case you would either have to install a MySQL database on your managed server or start using EC2.