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I installed a LAMP stack in my AWS EC2 instances so that I can use the MySQL server. Somebody recommended using RDS. But RDS is not free and also a MySQL server. My question is what makes RDS so special comparing with my MySQL server in EC2 instances?

Thanks. By the way, I'm quite new to AWS.

alkar
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Bagusflyer
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  • possible duplicate of [What are the respective advantages/limitations of Amazon RDS vs. EC2 with MySQL?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4806272/what-are-the-respective-advantages-limitations-of-amazon-rds-vs-ec2-with-mysql) – Anthony Neace Feb 24 '14 at 00:18
  • I didn't find this one.Thank you for your reply. – Bagusflyer Feb 24 '14 at 01:54
  • What do you mean by 'But RDS is not free and also a MySQL server' – alkar Feb 24 '14 at 12:33

1 Answers1

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RDS is a managed solution. Which means, AWS staff will take care of:

  • Patches
  • Backups
  • Maintenance
  • Making sure it's alive

Hosting your database in a second EC2 instance means that:

  • You have to manage everything of the above

Using a LAMP stack and co-hosting Apache and MySQL is the cheapest, but:

  • You have to manage everything of the above
  • You're probably hosting a database on an instance exposed to the internet

That said, if you're planning to host a production website / service that's more than a personal website / blog / experiment you'll probably need to host webserver and database in different instances. Picking RDS is less of a headache.

For anything thats not that important, a LAMP stack makes more sense. Less scalability, potentially less security but also less administrative overhead and costs.

alkar
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    This may do more sense when you need to add the second machine with apache/php, if mysql is hosted outside it is possible to maintain the same configuration for both machines. Setup of a FrontEnd security group and Database security groups, permiting access to Database security groups only from FrontEnd machines. – Alessandro Oliveira Feb 24 '14 at 18:04