Welcome back, Blaine here. We're talking about databases. Now, we just covered the differences that you want to consider when choosing between a build-your-own-database strategy and using the Amazon Relational Database Service, or RDS. Again, the big advantage being that we will take care of all those undifferentiated heavy lifting tasks, such as backups or operating system management. I want to show you how easy it is to use RDS in your own account. I'm already logged in here, and all you have to do is go down to the RDS service, before you start launching your system. Now, you might already have your own VPC and your own private subnets created, I've already taken care of that in my account as well. When it comes time to launch an instance, all you have to do is say, create a database. The first question you get asked is what type of database do you want to launch. Odds are your DBA already knows the answer to this. You might be an Oracle shop, or you might use Microsoft SQL Server, or perhaps just a MySQL or a PostgreSQL database. Whichever flavor it is, we've got the options here, including the Amazon Aurora database, which is a MySQL-compatible engine that is designed to work cloud-native, meaning it's going to give you more power at less cost all native inside your VPC. For this demonstration, let's go ahead and launch a MySQL instance. Once we select the instance, we can go ahead and choose Next, and now it's going to ask us a couple questions. Whether or not we want to launch a production version of MySQL or just a development version. This is specifically concerned over the idea of a Multi-Availability Zone deployment or a Single-AZ. If I'm using a MySQL database for a developer, I'm not worried about high availability. In that case, because a Multi-AZ strategy costs more, I'd absolutely go with the Dev option. But in this case, we're going to be launching a production database. So by choosing the Production-MySQL, it's going to automatically give us that Multi-AZ option. Now that we're here inside the details, we can of course choose which database engine version you want, and there's a wide range of different MySQL versions we support. You'll see an option to choose a license model, but in MySQL, there is simply the general license that's available. For some of our other flavors, you might have the option to bring your own license, or the special licensing agreements that you need, or use the pay-as-you-go option that comes with AWS. Additional options will be how large of a database do you want to start with, and this of course can be changed. If you want to start with a small database and then as demand grows, change it over time, that absolutely is one of the benefits of RDS. Additional options we'll go ahead and take as default, but you can choose as we look at IOPS to know how much communication do you want to provision, what kind of storage do you want. All of these become elements that of course are editable over time, but give you fine granular control over what types of communications are available, as well as what your monthly cost will be. And there's no surprises, it'll tell you right upfront exactly what the cost is going to be. How much for the provisioned IOPS, how much for database instance and storage. We want no surprises at all as you provision the exact database you need for your application. Now, we now can choose some settings that are specific to your database. This is going to be your initial login settings with the master username and password it's going to be. Of course, we recommend that you change this once you get logged in, so there's no concerns about anyone else but you having the master password. This database identifier in my case is our corporate directory. We give it our master username, as well as our super secret password. By the way, don't ever save the password when it asks you to do that. Now, where do you want to launch it? Now we simply choose which VPC, which subnet group, and we're just going to go ahead and take the defaults out of this. Public accessibility? No, I don't want this public. This is going to be my private database with a front-end instance. As far as anything else, what security groups we want? What individual database options? These all become choices you can do to give you specific elements, and we'll just take the defaults as-exist. Encryption? I absolutely want encryption. So in this case, we're going to leave the default to Enable encryption, which is going to connect right to our own master key, that's part of our setups. As far as backups go, you set up how often you keep the backups and how long you keep the backups. In my case, I want my backups to retain for not just every seven days, but I like to keep backups for two weeks. So we make that change. We can of course say exactly when we want the backups to happen. I'm okay keeping the defaults there as well. Monitoring, enhanced monitoring is going to give me additional information. We want to go ahead and keep that option available. Performance insights, all these options as default we're going to stick with. And finally, log export we want to send them off to, we absolutely can go ahead and select those. On our maintenance contracts for AWS, we want to know if we want to enable minor version upgrades. Do we want to stay on this version, so it doesn't automatically upgrade? I'll go ahead and keep the current elements. In my case, because my DBA is not tied to a specific DB version, we'll go ahead and take each minor version as it comes. Check with your DBA to decide which option's best for her. And finally, Deletion protection, I absolutely want this one checked. I don't want someone accidentally or inadvertently sending a delete command and having it accepted. We've got all our pieces in place, let's create the database. And now, the engine takes over. At this point, we sit back, allow for all the pieces to come into play, and when we're done, AWS will have created the engine for you. In this case, a MySQL engine, but for you, it'll be whatever database flavor you want in your VPC. Whether it's a Single-AZ or a Multi-AZ strategy, it's going to be what you need, and all you have to worry about now is the data itself.
