Amazon Web Services: RDS

RDS o Relataional Database System is the service provided by AWS to host, obviously, relational databases in the cloud. It provide the most used engines such as: MySQL, Postgres, Oracle.

Management

Amazon provides an easy to follow interface to create and manage the databases, offering monitoring, logs, performance stats among others. We can scale our database layer both vertically and horizontally by increasing the hardware properties o by adding read replicas respectively. In order to use this service we just configure everything from the console and get the database connection which is used from our application. We should also set security constraints for production databases so hey can only be accesed by specific EC2 instances.

Other features

Read more about RDS here

Next steps

We have our instance running, the media files have their place and now we're connected to the database on the cloud using a service with high performance in a separate layer from our main application. Let's continue scaling our architecture by adding extra instances and seeing how to manage them together using the concept of a Load Balancer