Why should I use AWS RDS?

Question

I installed a LAMP stack in my AWS EC2 instances so that I can use the MySQL server. Somebody recommended using RDS. But RDS is not free and also a MySQL server. My question is what makes RDS so special comparing with my MySQL server in EC2 instances?

Thanks. By the way, I'm quite new to AWS.

Answer 1

RDS is a managed solution. Which means, AWS staff will take care of:

• Patches
• Backups
• Maintenance
• Making sure it's alive

Hosting your database in a second EC2 instance means that:

• You have to manage everything of the above

Using a LAMP stack and co-hosting Apache and MySQL is the cheapest, but:

• You have to manage everything of the above
• You're probably hosting a database on an instance exposed to the internet

That said, if you're planning to host a production website / service that's more than a personal website / blog / experiment you'll probably need to host webserver and database in different instances. Picking RDS is less of a headache.

For anything thats not that important, a LAMP stack makes more sense. Less scalability, potentially less security but also less administrative overhead and costs.