How different is an Amazon EC2 RDS DB Instance different from the normal EC2 Instance?

Question

How different is the Amazons RDS DB Instance different from The normal EC2 Instance other than the fact that RDS DB Instance has a Database server running on it?

When an EC2 Instance goes down all the data associated with it also vanishes(when you dont attach an EBS). Is this true for RDS DB Instance as well?

I have already set up my database server with the following: 1 small Instance?(m1.small) with Mysql and attached a 10GB EBS and routed the Mysql Data Directories to EBS.

Is the small Instance of EC2 RDS any Different from the above?

Answer 1

RDS is a unmanaged MySQL service, means you only start and load data into it and your ready to go.

Is the small Instance of EC2 RDS any Different from the above?

The small instance of RDS is a 64bit, which support multi AZ failover and pricing obviously is a little expensive compared to EC2 MySQL.

EC2 Mysql needs more administration, but you can setup it up to do replication and you can customize it to have better performance compared to RDS.

See also http://www.dotdeb.org/2010/05/04/mysql-on-amazon-benchmarks-rds-vs-ec2/

Answer 2

An RDS db instance can be configured to not lose any data during downtime, either planned or unplanned. For unplanned downtime, AWS keeps transaction logs which are replayed automatically on a failover instance. These logs can also be used to get an instance to a specific point in time. For planned downtime, you create a DB snapshot prior to stopping the instance, and can later start a new instance with the saved snapshot.