Operate And Manage A Relational Database On The Cloud

WaiChun
2 min readJun 19, 2020
RDS

Understand the basic concepts of RDS, the benefits of using it compared to a conventional database solution and the key features of our RDS.

Without cloud, how set up a database?

  1. prepare hardware
  2. install operating system
  3. install database software
  4. tweaking

Conclusion: costly and it cost around 3 to 5 hours

With cloud, how set up a database?

  1. purchase a cloud server with desired OS pre-installed.
  2. install database software
  3. configure and tweaking

Conclusion: easier, less cost, take around 50 to 90 minute.

In the cloud era, all we would want to do is just choose a service purchase, a service that encodes. But it still more complicated than we expect, therefore it come out a Platform as a Service (PaaS) to purchase a cloud database, which in Alibaba Cloud, and this would be using the RDS service.

How convenient would this be?

  1. choose the desired service
  2. pay
  3. take and use

By using PaaS, you only need to take care of the application and data. Without cloud, you have to take care other such as networking, storage server, operating system, middleware and more.

Using RDS you just have to take care of the cloud database service-related tasks, such as security task, manage database and account. If you need performance, you always can perform vertical and horizontal scaling with a click.

RDS Key features

  1. choose from popular database: MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL
  2. high availability, high performance, fully managed service
  3. not worry about hardware, operating system or runtime environment.
  4. backup instances anytime
  5. automatically switch to backup RDS instance to ensure service availability
  6. Pas-as-You-Go or Subscription pricing mode
  7. real-time traffic monitoring
  8. SQL audit, keep track who accessed the instance, and action was taken
  9. firewall/ whitelist IP configure
  10. create read-only database and sync to reduce pressure to main instance

Of course there pros and cons between Alibaba RDS VS other cloud database service. Which provider provide better service is vary to your business.

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