AWS provides many database related services out of which following 5 are the most used services:
- Amazon RDS (Relational Database service)
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon Aurora
- Amazon Redshift
- Amazon ElastiCache
Following are the other database services provided by AWS:
- DocumentDB
- Amazon Neptune
- Athena
- Glue
- AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
- Amazon Timestream
- AWS Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)
- Amazon MemoryDB for Redis
Following are the unique attributes of these database services:
RDS –
AWS RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service) is a managed service provided by Amazon Web Services that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It automates tasks like database provisioning, patching, backups, and recovery, allowing you to focus on your applications rather than managing the database infrastructure.
RDS supports several database engines, including:
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- PostgreSQL
- Oracle
- Microsoft SQL Server
DynamoDB –
Amazon DynamoDB is NoSQL database service provided by AWS. It is fully managed by AWS and is serverless. It allows you to store and retrieve any amount of data, and it automatically scales to handle large amounts of traffic. Unlike traditional SQL databases, DynamoDB is schema-less, which means it can store data in a flexible, non-relational format (key-value pairs, documents)
Aurora –
AWS Aurora is also Relational Database service but it is better than RDS in terms of – performance, scalability, storage, replication etc.. Although it supports only 2 Database engines i.e. MySQL and PostgreSQL, also it is costlier then AWS RDS.
Redshift –
Amazon Redshift is a fully managed peta byte scale data warehouse service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows you to store and analyze large amounts of data quickly and efficiently
Amazon ElastiCache –
It provides in-memory data caching for frequently accessed data in real-time applications, thus significantly improving the performance and latency of applications by reducing the need for constant database queries.
DocumentDB –
AWS DocumentDB is a managed NoSQL database service that is designed to be compatible with MongoDB. It’s optimized for storing, querying, and processing semi-structured data like JSON documents.
Amazon Neptune –
It is a is a fully managed graph database service provided by AWS (Amazon Web Services). It is designed for applications that need to work with highly connected datasets, where relationships between data points are just as important as the data itself.
Expand to see common use cases of Amazon Neptune
- Social Networking: Building applications like social media networks, where understanding user connections and relationships is key.
- Recommendation Engines: Leveraging connected data to make product, service, or content recommendations based on users’ behavior and relationships.
- Fraud Detection: Identifying patterns in financial transactions or user behavior to detect fraudulent activities.
- Network and IT Operations: Visualizing and managing dependencies in complex IT networks or cloud infrastructure setups.
Athena –
Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that allows you to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL queries. You do not need to setup or manage any infrastructure, you only pay for the queries you run. It is well suited for ad hoc and exploratory analysis on data stored in S3 without the need for maintaining a separate database.
Glue –
This a serverless ETL service that is used to extract, transform and load data. It can be used for application development, machine learning and analytics.
AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) –
It is a managed migration and replication service that helps move your database and analytics workloads to AWS quickly, securely, and with minimal downtime and zero data loss.
Amazon Timestream –
It provides time-series database engines for workloads ranging from low-latency queries to large-scale data ingestion. It is generally used for analytics purposes.
AWS Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) –
Amazon Keyspaces needs to be used if you want to keep your Apache Cassandra database on AWS cloud.
Expand to learn more about Apache Cassandra
Apache Cassandra is an open-source, NoSQL database designed to store data for applications that require fast read and write performance. For example, you can use Cassandra to store user profile information for online video games, device metadata for internet of things (IoT) applications, or records for events.
Amazon MemoryDB for Redis-
It is a Redis compatible in-memory database service for ultra-fast performance.
Expand to learn more about Redis
Redis (Remote Dictionary Server) is an open-source, in-memory data structure store that is widely used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis is known for its speed and efficiency because it stores data in-memory rather than on disk, making it highly responsive for real-time applications.
Expand to see use cases of Amazon MemoryDB
- Caching: Storing frequently accessed data in memory for faster retrieval.
- Real-time analytics: High-speed data processing for dashboards or metrics.
- Session management: Handling user sessions in web applications.
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