How to setup an AWS database for your group project

Last semester, many groups noted that their largest efficiently problem was due to trouble in sharing their database. In this guide, I will show you how to setup a free database on Amazon Web Services for your group project, so that everyone can share it.

This has two sections. The first section only needs to be done by one group member, but the second will need to be done by every group member.

Section 1: For one group member

Only one group member will need to setup the database in AWS. First, that group member (if they don’t already have one) will need to sign up for an AWS Educate account.

When you finish setting up your account, and sign into the Management Console, you will see a lot of buttons. But all you need to do is go to Services >Database>RDS (RDS stands for relational database service). This will take you to the RDS console.

The Amazon RDS Console

On the left bar, click on Instances and then Launch DB Instance.

The menu to create an instance

Make sure that when you setup the instance you click the button on the bottom that says only enable options eligible for RDS Free Usage Tier. This will prevent you from being charged.

You will see a page with many options, but the only thing you need to focus on is Settings at the bottom of the page. Choose a meaningful name, and a username and password you will use for the database. (you will share this with your group members).

Click next and then Launch DB Instance (you don’t have to worry about any advanced settings). After a few minutes, your instance will be running.

Once it is running, click on what you just setup on the Instance menu, and search for the endpoint. It should look something like the following.

cmsc389ngroupproject.cmdslfjj4unri.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com

Last thing, under Advanced Settings make the instance publicly accessible, not that in order to access the database, you will still need the username/password.

Section 2: For every group member

While your database instance is managed from AWS, the console is not where you will interact with your database. Every group member will need a client application to do that.

I recommend using DataGrip by Jetbrains. You can get it free if you are a student here: https://www.jetbrains.com/student/.

The Datagrip console may look a bit daunting, but I will talk you through it.

1. Find the Data Sources window. On mac, this is done by going to File->Data Sources.
2. Click on + in the top right, and then MySQL
3. Fill out the Host, Database, User and Password fields. For Host use endpoint from section one, as well as for user and password. You should be able to leave the Database field blank. You may have to click on Update driver files on the bottom of the window.
4. Click Test Connection to make sure everything is setup, and then click OK.

From there you can each use the DataGrip console to interact with the database. Because the database is hosted on AWS you will all be remotely interacting with the same database, and do not need to worry about sharing the database in-between you.

I would like to thank Colin King and his class CMSC389L (Practical Cloud Computing) for giving me the base to learn how to do this.

Please comment if you have any questions and I will try and get to them.