AWS News Blog

Amazon RDS – 2016 in Review

Even though we published 294 posts on this blog last year, I left out quite a number of worthwhile launches! Today I would like to focus on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and recap all of the progress that the teams behind this family of services made in 2016. The team focused on four major areas last year:

  • High Availability
  • Enhanced Monitoring
  • Simplified Security
  • Database Engine Updates

Let’s take a look at each of these areas…

High Availability
Relational databases are at the heart of many types of applications. In order to allow our customers to build applications that are highly available, RDS has offered multi-AZ support since early 2010 (read Amazon RDS – Multi-AZ Deployments For Enhanced Availability & Reliability for more info). Instead of spending weeks setting up multiple instances, arranging for replication, writing scripts to detect network, instance, & network issues, making failover decisions, and bringing a new secondary instance online, you simply opt for Multi-AZ Deployment when you create the Database Instance. RDS also makes it easy for you to create cross-region read replicas.

Here are some of the other enhancements that we made in 2016 in order to help you to achieve high availability:

Enhanced Monitoring
We announced the first big step toward enhanced monitoring at the end of 2015 (New – Enhanced Monitoring for Amazon RDS) with support for MySQL, MariaDB, and Amazon Aurora and then made additional announcements in 2016:

Simplified Security
We want to make it as easy and simple as possible for you to use encryption to protect your data, whether it is at rest or in motion. Here are the enhancements that we made in this area last year:

Database Engine Updates
The open source community and the vendors of commercial databases add features and produce new releases at a rapid pace and we track their work very closely, aiming to update RDS as quickly as possible after each significant release. Here’s what we did in 2016:

Stay Tuned
We’ve already made some big announcements this year (you can find them in the AWS What’s New for 2017) with plenty more in store including the recently announced PostgreSQL-compatible version of Aurora, so stay tuned! You may also want to subscribe to the AWS Database Blog for detailed posts that will show you how to get the most from RDS, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon ElastiCache.

Jeff;

PS – This post does not include all of the enhancements that we made to AWS Database Migration Service or the Schema Conversion Tool last year. I’m working on another post on that topic.

Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is Chief Evangelist for AWS. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since.