2.5. Core AWS Services: Databases

Databases are critical components for almost all applications, providing a structured way to store and manage data. AWS offers a wide range of database services, each designed with distinct first principles to handle varying data models, access patterns, and scalability requirements.

💡 First Principle: The First Principle of AWS databases is to provide managed, scalable, and specialized solutions for diverse data needs, enabling users to choose the right database for their application while abstracting the complexities of database administration. This allows businesses to build robust data-driven applications.

This section provides a high-level overview of the most common AWS database services: Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Aurora.

Scenario: A company needs to store transactional customer data, product catalogs (with flexible schema), and historical sales data for analytics. They need to choose the appropriate database service for each.

Reflection Question: How do diverse AWS database services (e.g., RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora) fundamentally enable businesses to choose the right database solution for their data based on model, access patterns, and scalability, while simplifying database administration?