Amazon RDS Aurora vs RDS MySQL vs MySQL on EC2?

Question

I\'ve been looking around for best practices when setting up your database on the cloud but it still isn\'t clear to me which of the following solutions should we be going for?<

Answer 1

AWS RDS is the managed database solution which provides support for multiple database options Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. When you go with RDS it will provide inbuilt configuration options such as.

• Database Replication for High Availability
• Read Replicas for Scalability
• Backups & Restore
• Operating system and software patches & etc.

This simplifies the overhead of database administration. However the flexibility is limited to the RDS offerings.

Alternatively if you host your database in EC2 instance, you can install the required versions of the database engines, install needed extensions & etc. which provides more flexibility but also requires expertise & adds administration overhead.

When you consider Amazon Aurora in RDS, it differs from the rest of the engines because, its new and fully implemented by Amazon from ground up and offers higher performance, reliability out of the box (As marketed by Amazon) with reasonable pricing. However one limitation with Aurora is that its not included in AWS free-tier, where the smallest instance type it supports is "small".

Note: Some of the features offered by RDS and cost differs, based on the database option you select.