Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

I could spin up an Amazon EC2 instance and install PostgreSQL myself, review latest configuration best practices, sort Amazon EBS storage for data, set up a snapshot process etc.

Alternatively I could use Amazon RDS, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL or Heroku Postgres and have most of that work handled for me, by a team of world experts...

Hosting the main relational DB engine

• Scalable
• Accessed by the backend (AWS EC2)
• Automatic minor upgrades
• Automated daily backups

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL or Amazon DynamoDB? If you need to follow RDBS concepts choose Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL). This choice will guarantee a stable relational database with a great support for years from PostgreSQL Global Development Group. But, you need a great scalable NoSQL database. You can use Amazon DynamoDB. The most important thing about this is that you can use RESTful HTTP API to access data.

We use Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL because RDS and Amazon DynamoDB are two distinct database systems. DynamoDB is NoSQL DB whereas RDS is a relational database on the cloud. The pricing will mainly differ in the type of application you are using and your requirements. For some applications, both DynamoDB and RDS, can serve well, for some it might not. I do not think DynamoDB is cheaper. Right now we are helping Companies in Silicon Valley and in Southern California go SERVERLESS - drastically lowering costs if you are interested in hearing how we go about it.

From a StackShare Community member: "We’re debating going with Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL or Amazon DynamoDB. Cost is our main concern but we’re also curious about other potential benefits/differences. Which one would you recommend and why?"

We use AWS mostly because Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is a very good and cheap solution to get a managed PostgreSQL.

We also use Amazon EC2 for the servers, with the Arch Linux images from Uplink Labs. We chose Arch Linux because of its up-to-date packages, especially for Python. We use Pacman to package and deploy our services.

PostgreSQL provides our primary storage backend for storing relational data. It is hosted using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.

We initially started out with Heroku as our PaaS provider due to a desire to use it by our original developer for our Ruby on Rails application/website at the time. We were finding response times slow, it was painfully slow, sometimes taking 10 seconds to start loading the main page. Moving up to the next "compute" level was going to be very expensive.

We moved our site over to AWS Elastic Beanstalk , not only did response times on the site practically become instant, our cloud bill for the application was cut in half.

In database world we are currently using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL also, we have both MariaDB and Microsoft SQL Server both hosted on Amazon RDS. The plan is to migrate to AWS Aurora Serverless for all 3 of those database systems.

Additional services we use for our public applications: AWS Lambda, Python, Redis, Memcached, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon ElastiCache

Using PostGIS to serve GeoJSON data for the Leaflet front-end. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL