Getting Started: AWS RDS
Amazon is a widely-known leader in many areas, especially famous for its flexible superfast cloud web services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers more than 200 services for different purposes, such as computing nodes, database instances, file storage, and so on.
The purpose of this article is to provide you with easy step-by-step information on how to set up AWS Relational Database Service for your studies or for your new work project. It is assumed that you already have a working AWS billing account.
- Set up a new VPC or use one that you already have. VPC stands for Virtual Private Cloud. It is a mechanism that helps split resources in your AWS account like they are in the different network segments. Do not forget to use 2 different CIDR’s. You can read more about CIDR notation here.
- If you are going to use your new database from the outside of AWS you must set up an Internet Gateway and connect it to your VPC. After creating an Internet Gateway, you should allow incoming connections to your VPC via Route Table and VPC security groups. Enter 0.0.0.0/0 in the destination if you want your RDS to be available for any external IPs. And choose your recently created Internet Gateway as a Target.
3. Finally, you can create your new RDS instance. Go to the RDS section, click on the button ‘Create database’, and choose the right parameters. For example, I will create a MySQL database on AWS RDS (you could use it for free in some cases — please read this page about free-tier). I want it to be available for connections from software on my local machine, so I will select these options on the next screen:
- Engine type MySQL
- Template Free-tier
- Enter the name for DB instance and administrator credentials
- Choose existent VPC
- Expand Additional Connectivity Configuration and circle Public access for external access to new DB instance
- Also, you could play with additional parameters, i.e. choose the maintenance window for software updates and backups.
