Glossary · Cloud & Hosting

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)

Amazon RDS is the AWS managed service that runs relational databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL and handles backups, patching and failover for you.

Updated October 6, 2026

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is an AWS service that runs relational database engines, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle and SQL Server, as a managed offering. AWS handles provisioning, backups, patching and optional replication, while you manage schemas, queries and access.

Why it matters

Running a database well is hard work: backups, upgrades, replication and recovery all need care. RDS automates much of it. Multi-AZ deployments keep a standby copy in another availability zone and fail over automatically, and read replicas spread read traffic. You do not get operating system access, so some low-level tuning options are restricted.

Example

An application connects through an endpoint hostname, not an IP address:

mysql -h mydb.abc123.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com -u app -p

After a failover, the endpoint's DNS record points to the new primary, so a short DNS TTL and a client that reconnects are important.

Common mistakes

  • Making the instance publicly accessible instead of keeping it in a private subnet.
  • Treating Multi-AZ as a backup. It protects against hardware or zone failure, not accidental deletes.
  • Letting automated backups lapse or never testing a restore.
  • Applications that cache the resolved IP and fail to reconnect after failover.

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