Deciding between EC2 hosted or RDS managed MySQL

If you are migrating multiple MySQL databases to AWS or creating MySQL databases from scratch for your production workloads, you will find that some of them are a great fit for Amazon RDS while others are better suited to run directly on Amazon EC2. You may choose the best service from this post to accomplish your objectives more quickly and effectively. Let’s compare AWS RDS with AWS EC2 now.

Service Introduction

Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS): It is a SaaS-based solution that automatically sets up and keeps up your cloud database.

Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2): Scalable computing power is offered. It gives you the option to scale up or down in response to shifting needs.

Comparison of Services

• Note: The pricing of EC2 MySQL and RDS MySQL is mostly on similar lines with little deviations.

For Example

EC2 MySQL Pricing — https://calculator.aws/#/estimate?id=24ff359a6b1c47ddd139e410c1336da705b266f3

RDS MySQL Pricing — https://calculator.aws/#/estimate?id=ef15dcd0a17d1865afa61bea52a2bf83dbd5563e

Who manages what ?

When to use what ?

While choosing between RDS and EC2, the entire decision goes down to what you want — control or automated processes, cost of time, and the skills to manage. Both Amazon RDS and Amazon EC2 offer different advantages for running MySQL. Amazon RDS is easier to set up, manage, and maintain than running MySQL on Amazon EC2, and lets you focus on other important tasks, rather than the day-to-day administration of MySQL. Alternatively, running MySQL on Amazon EC2 gives you more control, flexibility, and choice. Depending on your application and your requirements, you might prefer one over the other.

Amazon RDS might be a better choice for you if

1. You want to focus on your business and applications, and have AWS take care of the undifferentiated heavy lifting tasks such as provisioning of the database, management of backup and recovery tasks, management of security patches, minor version upgrades, and storage management.
2. You need a highly available database solution and want to take advantage of the push-button, synchronous Multi-AZ replication offered by Amazon RDS, without having to manually set up and maintain a standby database.
3. You would like to have synchronous replication to a standby instance for high availability.
4. Your database size and IOPS needs are less than the RDS MySQL limits. Refer to Amazon RDS DB instance storage for the current maximum.
5. You don’t want to manage backups and, most importantly, point-in-time recoveries of your database.
6. You would rather focus on high-level tasks, such as performance tuning and schema optimization, rather than the daily administration of the database.
7. You want to scale the instance type up or down based on your workload patterns without being concerned about licensing and the complexity involved.

Amazon EC2 might be a better choice for you if

1. You need full control over the database, including SYS/SYSTEM user access, or you need access at the operating system level.
2. Your database size exceeds 80% of the current maximum database size in Amazon RDS.
3. You need to use MySQL features or options that are not currently supported by Amazon RDS.
4. Your database IOPS needs are higher than the current IOPS limit.
5. You need a specific MySQL version that is not supported by Amazon RDS. For more information, refer to AWS RDS MySQL Editions.

Conclusion:

Here in this post we have covered AWS EC2 Vs AWS RDS for deploying MySQL database, and discussed how to differentiate between them at different use-cases and scenarios.

If you need help with DevOps practices, or AWS at your company, feel free to reach out to us at Opsnetic.