RDS Options

In this part, we'll take a look at the options available when creating an RDS instance.

You don't need to setup an RDS instance right now, but feel free to follow along in the RDS console to see what options are available.

Navigate to the RDS Dashboard

Click on Create database

Create Database

You can probably get away with using the Easy create option

Engine options

Engine type

In the Engine type section, we can see which databases that RDS supports.

We'll be taking a look at the options for MySQL right now, but a lot of the options will be the same for other database types.

There are a few important things to note about the database engine options.

Limited Engine Options

This is a short list of database engines, considering the number of options available. RDS manages a lot of what's going on under the hood, so they will only support databases and versions that are in demand and that can be supported by their infrastructure.

Database Engine License

The open source databases won't come with any license fees, but databases like MS SQL Server and Oracle will have a license fee that you'll have to pay. You can bring your own license if you want, but it's still an extra consideration when thinking about the cost.

Aurora

Aurora is a proprietary database engine from AWS that's built on top of MySQL and PostgreSQL. It's a managed database service that's fully compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, but it has some additional features that make it more scalable and durable.

The promise of Aurora is really nice and it seems to be a good option to consider. However, in practice, it hasn't gotten a good reputation in the community. So for now, it's probably worth just chosing the engine that's best for you.

Edition

Here we can select which version of the DB engine to use.

The latest version of MySQL supported by RDS is 8.0.39 Community.

We can only show options that support certain features, or enable RDS Extended support if we want legacy versions of MySQL. We won't be selecting any of these options.

Templates

There are three templates to chose from: Production, Dev/test, and Free tier.

We will be using the Free teir for obvious reasons, but select one of the other templates to see the full list of options available in RDS.