[2] It is a web service running "in the cloud" designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications.
[4] Scaling storage and compute resources can be performed by a single API call to the AWS control plane on-demand.
AWS does not offer an SSH connection to the underlying virtual machine as part of the managed service.
[1][6][7] This was followed by support for Oracle Database in June 2011,[8][9] Microsoft SQL Server in May 2012,[10] PostgreSQL in November 2013,[11] and MariaDB (a fork of MySQL) in October 2015,[12] and an additional 80 features during 2017.
[19] Amazon RDS Multi-Availability Zone (AZ) allows users to automatically provision and maintain a synchronous physical or logical "standby" replica, depending on database engine, in a different Availability Zone[20] (independent infrastructure in a physically separate location).
Multi-AZ deployments aim to provide enhanced availability and data durability for MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL and SQL Server[21] instances and are targeted for production environments.
In December 2015, Amazon announced an optional enhanced monitoring feature that provides an expanded set of metrics for the MySQL, MariaDB, and Aurora database engines.
Reserved RDS Instances are offered in 1-year and 3-year terms and include no-upfront, partial-upfront, and all-upfront payment options.
[30] Apart from the hourly cost of running the RDS instance, users are charged for the amount of storage provisioned, data transfers and input and output operations performed.
AWS have introduced Provisioned Input and Output Operations, in which the user can define how many IO per second are required by their application.