AWS RDS or self-managed MySQL

Technical stack design and chosen is very important for initial stage start-ups. If we can do it right, the future issues could be avoided. There are many factors to build a scalable, cost efficient, high-performance system, but we will discuss a lot bit of the database vendor choices.

MySQL vs MongoDB

MySQL is the most widely used database which supports ACID:

• Atomicity
• Consistency
• Isolation
• Durability

Compare with MongoDB (NoSQL), MySQL (RDBMS) can be used in the transactional system. Lots of e-commerce systems use MySQL as the core trading database. It is free, mature, with a big technical community.

Features of AWS RDS

AWS RDS is a mantainance free MySQL system, you don’t have to do:

• Hardware provisioning
• Database setup
• Software patching
• Data backup
• Setup and managed the read replica
• Manually setup if you like to switch to a larger instance

It provides the features such as:

• Hot standby at another available zone (Multiple AZ) and automatic switch over when the master database fails with in 2 minutes downtime
• Automatic backup and snapshot
• Automatic scale up or down (with downtime)
• Tunned High-performance network and I/O

Self-managed MySQL or AWS RDS

Compare the price of the RDS with the same CPU/disk EC2 instance (db.m4.large vs m4.large):

You can see the on-demand price of RDS is roughly double the price of self-managed MySQL on the similar EC2 instance; the price of multi-az RDS doubles the single instance RDS.

How to choose

• If the database is running for critical business, you can choose multi-AZ RDS;
• If you have inhouse expert DBA, and system expert you can choose self-managed MySQL on EC2 instance;
• For average usage, We would recommend single instance AWS RDS.
• If you like to find someone to manage the cost efficient system for you, the please check: Managed AWS service