AWS Database Services: High-Level Overview
AWS has many database services to help ease doing database-related parts of a project on the cloud. It has RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Neptune, QLDB, DocumentDB, KeySpaces, and Timestream services in the category.
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RDS
The first service in this category is RDS, which is the Relational Database Service. Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale relational databases in the cloud; for example, using RDS service, you can easily launch Aurora, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.
Amazon DynamoDB
The next service in this category is Amazon DynamoDB. Basically, DynamoDB is an AWS NoSQL Database Service that applications can use if they have the requirement of consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale. Its flexible data model and reliable performance make it a great fit for many applications such as mobile, web, gaming, AdTech, and IoT.
ElastiCache
The other service in this category is ElastiCache. Essentially this is an in-memory cache service of AWS. It makes it easier to launch, manage, and scale distributed in-memory cache in the cloud.
Amazon Neptune
The other service in this category is Amazon Neptune, which is essentially an AWS Graph database service. Neptune Graph Database service makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets.
Amazon QLDB
The next service in the database category is Amazon QLDB, a ledger database with immutable and cryptographically verifiable transaction logs. For example, the Journal contains the current state and all the lineage of the history.
Say, for example, if you bought a new car and have it registered to the DMV. If you used Amazon QLDB, there would be two parts: one is the current state of the car, for example, who is the current owner, registration plate number, etc. And the other will be all transactions as immutable records will be stored. So, any time you can query the ledger database for the current state and all the historical lineage of the change records.
Amazon DocumentDB
The next service is Amazon DocumentDB. Essentially if you are looking for MongoDB on AWS, please use this service. It is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads.
Amazon Keyspaces
The next service is Amazon Keyspaces. This is managed, scalable, highly available Apache Cassandra compatible database service. So if you are looking for Apache Cassandra NoSQL database service on AWS, this is your service.
Amazon TimeStream
And the last service in the database category is Amazon TimeStream. It is a fast, scalable, and serverless time series database service. So, if you have a use case in which, for example, you need to quickly analyze time-series data generated by IoT applications using built-in analytic functions such as smoothing, approximation, and interpolation, Amazon TimeStream is your solution choice on AWS.
SK Singh is the founder, a software, cloud, and data engineer. He has been involved in the software industry for around 25 years. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from India and a master's degree in software engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. SK has been involved in a wide range of software projects for many governments, private, start-ups, and large public companies in various software engineering roles. He has many professional certifications such as AWS, Hadoop, Kafka, Oracle, Unix, Java, Java-related frameworks, and many others related.
