Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

Introduction to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is using the Amazon RDS for operating, setting up the environment, and scaling your deployments of PostgreSQL on cloud servers.

What is Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL?

The complete administrative tasks involved in the process are managed and handled by Amazon RDS which are usually very time-consuming and complex in nature. These tasks involve management of storage, upgradations of the packages and resources, installation of necessary software, read throughput should be high, for having high availability the provision of replication is made and in case of disaster or unavoidable circumstances if any data is corrupted that should be recovered from the backups managed by Amazon RDS.

Why PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL is the relational database used to a great extent and is becoming one of the most popular databases among the developers and can be used in various small-scale and enterprise applications as well as in startups. The PostgreSQL database is used in mobile applications as well as standalone software and other web applications.

PostgreSQL is an object-relational database and completely open-source and powerful with an overall experience of 30 years. It is very robust, reliable, and has high performance. To get more information about PostgreSQL, you can refer to this official link.

Why Amazon RDS?

Amazon RDS stands for Amazon Relational Database Service which is used for scaling and operating the relational database in the cloud and also managing its setup with minimal tasks and just a few clicks. We as developers can focus on the business logic and on our application and be tension-free about the performance, availability, compatibility, and security that is needed in our database that we will be using in our application.

Amazon RDS provides readymade functionalities such as automation of administrative tasks such as backups and patching, provision of hardware components, setup related to the database all of which usually take a lot of time, resizable and reasonable prices capacity. The facility is available for popular databases including Amazon Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle database, MariaDB, and SQL server. Data migration to amazon RDS is very easy.

how we can vertically and horizontally scale your RDS instance –

As and when our application grows and the number of users associated with it increases as well, there is more demand and requirement of extra space in the memory for storing the data in the database. The process of increasing the size of the database is called scaling. In Amazon RDS, we can either scale our database horizontally or vertically which completely depends on our application.
If the number of reading and write requests and operations are performed almost a roughly equal number of times, then we go for scaling our database vertically. In case if most of the operations being carried out in your database are highly reading the data from database to application then we prefer the horizontal scaling of the database with increasing demand to cope up with the necessity.

Vertical Scaling –

We can scale our master database vertically when your requirement to store the data increases at a rapid pace and this can be done simply by pushing a single button. Right now, there are over 18 available instances of sizes which you can choose from when trying to scale your application in PostgreSQL. These options are solely provided so that you can choose the best instance that fits up your cost of the database as well as the resources and capacity of the database. The vertical scaling will be choose provided if the read-write requests to the database are roughly equal in number.

Pre-requisite

The prerequisite that we should be aware of while vertically or horizontally scaling up our RDS instance are as listed below –

• You should make sure that you have a commercial engine such as Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and the correct licensing of it. Even if you have your license called as Bring Your Own License also referred to as BYOL. In the case of commercial engines, your license is tied up to the core or with CPU sockets.

• You will have to decide the time when you want your change of scaling to apply from the two available options. The first one is the immediate application of all the changes while the second one involves applying the change for your instance during the specified maintenance window.

• You have to keep in mind that the instance type and storage are completely different. So, while scaling up the instance of the database, the storage space still remains unchanged. Hence, you need to modify the storage space allocated to a database or either change the type of storage to improve the performance of your application.

• Note that your single-A-Z instance of the database will not be available for the time when scaling operation will be performed. This is because the scaling process has minimal downtime in a multi-A-Z environment.

Overview of the Process

The process of scaling the Amazon RDS vertically involves the following steps

• Change the instance type

You will have to open the Instance Actions Menu provided on the console of RDS and choose the modify option from the drop-down list as shown in the below figure –

• The next step involves choosing the new DB instance class. You can modify the existing DB instance as shown in the below image –

The last step is to decide the time when the change needs to occur. In case if you want to scale immediately, then you can choose the check box of Apply Immediate on modify page provided at the bottom of it. If this checkbox is not clicked then the change or scaling occurs at the preferred window of maintenance as per your specifications and definitions.

Conclusion

We can make use of Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to carry out all the administrative tasks in just a few clicks as the rest of everything is managed by amazon RDS and we can focus more on our application. We can also scale our database up or down depending on the requirement of your application to meet the increasing needs.

Recommended Articles

This is a guide to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. Here we discuss the Introduction, What is Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Why PostgreSQL respectively. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –

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