Posted On: Jun 5, 2013
The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) was designed to simplify one of the most complex of all common IT activities: managing and scaling a relational database while providing fast, predictable performance and high availability.
Amazon RDS in Action
During the last 3.5 years in operation, a lot has happened. Amazon RDS is now being used in mission-critical deployments by tens of thousands of businesses of all sizes. We now process trillions of I/O requests each month for these customers. We're seeing strong adoption in enterprises such as Samsung and Unilever, web-scale applications like Flipboard and Airbnb, and large-scale organizations like NASA JPL and Obama for America.
Amazon RDS Innovation
We have added support for three major database engines (MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server), expanded support to all nine of the AWS Regions, and added more than 50 highly requested features. Following is the list of a few key features:
- Multiple database engines: Support for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server in addition to MySQL.
- Multi-AZ deployments: This feature enables you to create highly available database deployments with synchronous replication across Availability Zones, automatic failure detection, and failover using just a few clicks on the AWS Management Console.
- Read Replicas: This feature makes it easy to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single database instance for read-heavy database workloads. You can promote a Read Replica to a master as needed and monitor the replication status directly through the AWS Management Console.
- Provisioned IOPS: Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is a storage option designed to deliver fast, predictable, and consistent I/O performance, and is optimized for I/O-intensive, transactional (OLTP) database workloads. You can provision up to 3TB of storage and 30,000 IOPS per database instance.
- Point-and-click access to database logs: You can view and download a variety of database log files to troubleshoot database issues directly using the AWS Management Console.
- DB Notifications via e-mail and SMS: You can subscribe to receive e-mail or SMS notifications when certain database events such as failover, low storage, replication state change etc. occur.
These innovations are powering some of the world’s most popular applications that are used by millions of users.
General Availability and Amazon RDS SLA
We’re officially calling Amazon RDS “Generally Available” after adding several important features as noted above. With the strong level of customer adoption, numerous new features and plenty of operational experience behind us, we also have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Amazon RDS, with 99.95% availability for Multi-AZ database instances on a monthly basis. This SLA is available for Amazon RDS for MySQL and Oracle, which are currently the database engines with Multi-AZ deployment support. If availability falls below 99.95% for your Multi-AZ database instance (which is a maximum of 22 minutes of unavailability for a Multi-AZ database instance per month), you will be eligible to receive service credits. The new Amazon RDS SLA is designed to give you additional confidence to run the most demanding and mission critical workloads dependably in the AWS cloud. You can learn more by visiting the Amazon RDS SLA page.