• RDS is a managed service: • Automated provisioning, OS patching • Continuous backups and restore to specific timestamp (Point in Time Restore)! • Monitoring dashboards • Read replicas for improved read performance • Multi AZ setup for DR (Disaster Recovery) • Maintenance windows for upgrades • Scaling capability (vertical and horizontal) • Storage backed by EBS (gp2 or io1) • BUT you can’t SSH into your instances, no need waise since all is already manged

eventually consistent means that if say it reads before replicate is made, it will read old data, but eventually it will replicate updated data

• Up to 15 Read Replicas
• Within AZ, Cross AZ or Cross Region
• Replication is ASYNC so reads are eventually consistent
• Replicas can be promoted to their own DB
• Applications must update the connection string to leverage read replica

Use cases:

• You have a production database that is taking on normal load
• You want to run a reporting application to run some analytics
• You create a Read Replica to run the new workload there, cant read direclty from master hence will have to create a read replica
• The production application is unaffected
• Read replicas are used for SELECT (=read) only kind of statements (not INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE)