Hey, Cloud Gurus, welcome to an introduction to Amazon RDS.

My name is Abhaya Chauhan,

and I'm excited to take you on this journey.
I've been a developer, architect, and teacher for 20 years
and have helped many companies scale and distribute
their applications effectively in the cloud.
My mission is to help software development teams
leverage AWS, to speed up their time to market
and deliver value to their customers
faster, cheaper and better.
You can get in touch on Twitter or my blog,
so please don't hesitate to reach out.
Next, let's run through a quick course overview
to discuss what we'll focus on in this course.
First off, we'll get straight in to discussing,
what is Amazon RDS?
And, set up the foundations to build upon.
We'll go through some core terminology
we need to be aware of while working with RDS.
In the next section,
we'll take a detailed look at the process
of setting up a database instance.
We'll also discuss key variables in pricing and scaling,
which is very important in a production level database.
Security and Monitoring are critically important
when talking about databases.
We'll look at how to secure your database,
as in most cases it is the most sensitive resource
you have in your architecture.
Then we'll take a look at tools and services
you have available to monitor your database.
Next, high availability and read replicas.
And, this is where RDS really shines.
We'll take a deep look
in to how Multi-AZ setup works with RDS,
and how you can leverage read replicas
to scale your database performance.
No RDS course is complete
without discussing backups and recovery.
We'll get to understand the options available for backups,
and how you can approach restoring your database backups.
Lastly, we can't forget Amazon's own baby,
Aurora and Aurora Serverless.
Through this section, you'll get a good understanding
of what Aurora and Aurora Serverless is,
and how it compares to traditional database engines.
We'll get in to how they work,
and how they are different from those other engines.
At the end of this course,
you'll have a very good understanding
of all the options you have available in Amazon RDS,
one of the most popular services available on AWS.
You'll be comfortable in setting up
a secure, production grade database
for the engine of your choice,
including the cloud native Aurora and Aurora Serverless.
Before we jump in to this course,
let's discuss the prerequisites before taking this course.
I would recommend a basic understanding
of a relational database.
In this course, we do take a look at Postgres and MySQL,
but the specific engine is not very important.
I focus on Amazon RDS,
rather than SQL and the database engine specifically.
Have an AWS account,
with access to Management Console
to set up RDS database instances.
An important note here is that even though
I try my best to stay within the free tier,
some of the features I need to show you,
are outside the free tier.
A basic understanding of AWS services such as,
AWS Lambda, which is used to test out RDS database.
Security Groups, VPCs, and Subnets,
which we'll discuss in a little detail
when looking at securing our database instance.