Amazon RDS Features

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 Amazon Aurora features page.

You can use the AWS Management Console, the Amazon RDS Command Line Interface, SDKs, or simple API calls to access the capabilities of a production-ready relational database in minutes.

Amazon RDS database instances are preconfigured with parameters and settings appropriate for the engine and class you have selected. You can launch a database instance and connect your application within minutes. DB Parameter Groups provide granular control and fine-tuning of your database.

Amazon RDS lowers your administrative burden by managing the undifferentiated administrative tasks, such as software patching, backups, provisioning, and scheduled maintenance jobs. Amazon RDS will make sure that the relational database software powering your deployment stays up to date with the latest patches. You can exert optional control over when and if your database instance is patched.

Amazon RDS provides Amazon CloudWatch metrics for your database instances at no additional charge. You can use the Amazon RDS Console to view key operational metrics, including compute/memory/storage capacity utilization, I/O activity, and instance connections. Amazon RDS also provides enhanced monitoring, which provides access to over 50 CPU, memory, file system, and disk I/O metrics, and Amazon RDS Performance Insights, an easy-to-use tool that helps you quickly detect performance problems.

Amazon RDS is integrated with AWS CloudFormation, a service that helps you model, provision, and manage your AWS resources across your AWS accounts and Regions. When creating Amazon RDS resources with AWS CloudFormation, you can simplify the management of resources and infrastructure, by reusing your templates and allowing AWS CloudFormation to provision and configure your resources.

Amazon RDS can notify you through email or SMS text message of database events through Amazon Simple Notification Services (Amazon SNS). You can use the AWS Management Console or the Amazon RDS APIs to subscribe to over 40 different database events associated with your database instances.

Amazon RDS integrates with AWS Config to support compliance and enhance security by recording and auditing changes to the configuration of your DB instance, including parameter groups, subnet groups, snapshots, security groups, and event subscriptions.

Amazon Aurora supports quick, efficient cloning operations, where entire multi-terabyte database clusters can be cloned in minutes. Database cloning is useful for a number of purposes including application development, testing, database updates, and running analytical queries. The immediate availability of data can significantly accelerate your software development and upgrade projects, and make analytics more accurate. You can clone an Amazon Aurora database in only a few steps, and you don't incur any storage charges, except if you use additional space to store data changes.

Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments allow you to make safer, simpler, and faster database updates with zero data loss. In a few steps, Blue/Green Deployments create a staging environment that mirrors the production environment and keeps the two environments in sync using logical replication. You can make changes—such as major/minor version upgrades, schema modifications, and parameter setting changes—without impacting your production workload.

When promoting your staging environment, Blue/Green Deployments block writes to both the blue and green environments until switchover is complete. Blue/Green Deployments use built-in switchover guardrails that time out promotion if it exceeds your maximum tolerable downtime, detect replication errors, check instance health, and more.

Amazon RDS provides best practice guidance by analyzing configuration and usage metrics from your database instances. Recommendations cover areas such as database engine versions, storage, instance types, and networking. You can browse the available recommendations and perform a recommended action immediately, schedule it for their next maintenance window, or dismiss it entirely.

Amazon RDS offers a choice of two different storage types. For most use cases, Amazon RDS 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 Amazon 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 how to create an Amazon ElastiCache cluster in Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora documentation pages to learn more.

Amazon DevOps Guru is a cloud operations service powered by machine learning (ML) that helps improve application availability. With Amazon 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 Management Console and enable Amazon RDS Performance Insights. Once Performance Insights is on, go to the Amazon DevOps Guru Console and enable it for your Amazon 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, allow 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 are designed to provide you with faster database performance with up to 2X faster query processing at no additional cost. Optimized Reads improve 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 improve 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 of 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 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 for 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.

With Amazon 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 Availability Zones.

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.

Amazon Aurora Global Database enables fast local reads and quick disaster recovery across multiple AWS Regions from a single Amazon 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. 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 (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 Transparent Data Encryption in SQL Server and Oracle. Transparent Data Encryption in Oracle is integrated with AWS CloudHSM, which allows you to securely generate, store, and manage your cryptographic keys in single-tenant Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances on AWS cloud.

Amazon RDS supports the use of SSL to secure data in transit.

AWS recommends that you run your database instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (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 Managed Active Directory (AD) to authenticate and centrally manage credentials. For Amazon RDS for SQL Server, you have the choice of going through AWS Managed 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.

Amazon GuardDuty is available with Amazon Aurora to monitor for potential threats to your database and workloads. With 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.

You can scale the compute and memory resources powering your deployment up or down, up to a maximum of 128 vCPUs and 4,096 GiB of RAM. Compute scaling operations typically complete in a few minutes.

As your storage requirements grow, you can also provision additional storage. The Amazon 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, RDS Proxy can reduce failover times by up to 66% for Amazon Aurora and RDS. In addition, you can centrally manage your database credentials, authentication, and access via integration with AWS Secrets Manager and AWS IAM.

Amazon Aurora Serverless is a configuration for Aurora that is on-demand and provides auto-scaling 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 up-front 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.

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

Amazon RDS allows you to easily stop and start your database instances for up to seven 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.

Amazon 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 Amazon 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 one 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), or License Included (LI). With BYOL and BYOM, you can take advantage of your existing commercial software license to use with Amazon RDS. With License Included, the cost of the software license is included in the Amazon RDS instance pricing. 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, and Amazon RDS Custom pricing pages.

Trusted Language Extensions (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 Amazon 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. 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 Amazon Aurora machine learning, 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 machine learning services.

With Amazon 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 machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models in your database, such as those from Amazon Bedrock (limited preview) 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 Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.

Amazon RDS offers the flexibility and scalability to quickly adjust to your database needs. With a push of a button, you can scale your database compute resource up or down, or with a few clicks in the console, you can spin up a new database instance.

AWS 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 Database Migration Service (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 DMS Fleet Advisor and DMS Schema Conversion, you can discover, plan, convert, and migrate your workloads all within AWS DMS. With 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 DMS Schema Conversion, or the option to download AWS Schema Conversion Tool (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 Amazon Aurora, Babelfish enables Aurora PostgreSQL to understand T-SQL, making it simpler, faster to migrate your applications.

With Amazon 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 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 Amazon 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 Amazon 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 (via the V8 JavaScript engine), and Rust (RDS for PostgreSQL only). You can utilize community extensions, such as pg_stat_statements or postgres_fdw for foreign data wrappers.

They also include PostgreSQL’s support for ‘JSON’ data type and two JSON functions. These allow 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 here.

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 associating with your database instance.

Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement.

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.

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 can appreciate how simple it is to get started and manage Amazon RDS.

Amazon RDS frees up time for database administrators (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 via AWS IAM.

Amazon RDS is a relational (or SQL) database.

Amazon RDS supports seven database engines, which includes five open-source and two commercial engines. Under open-source, there are: Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition, Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS for MySQL, and Amazon RDS for MariaDB. Under commercial engines, there are Amazon RDS for Oracle and Amazon RDS for SQL Server.

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.

Amazon RDS can be set up with a few simple clicks within the AWS Management Console. Go to Amazon RDS documentation and follow the set up instructions.

Please visit Amazon RDS documentation and/or feature-specific pages from 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, RDS for PostgreSQL, RDS for MySQL, RDS for MariaDB, RDS for Oracle, and RDS for SQL Server.