Getting Started With Amazon RDS

The AWS Management Console is a web-based interface for accessing and managing your Amazon RDS resources. You can easily and securely create new database instances, modify their parameters, scale compute and memory resources, increase database storage, and perform snapshots. The Amazon RDS Getting Started Guide shows you step-by-step how to perform these tasks.

To control and automate Amazon RDS resources from the command line, download and install the Amazon Relational Database Service Command Line Interface. A quick reference card is also available.

Amazon RDS allows you to use a simple set of web services APIs to create, delete and modify database instances. You can also control access and security for your instances and manage your database backups and snapshots. For a full list of the available Amazon RDS APIs, please see the Amazon RDS API Guide. Some of the most commonly used APIs and their functionality are listed below:

• CreateDBInstance — Provision a new DB Instance, specifying DB Engine, DB Instance class, storage capacity, DB Engine version (optional), the backup retention policy you wish to use, and whether you want to run the DB Instance as a Multi-AZ deployment. This one API call is all that’s needed to give you access to a running database, with the software pre-installed and the available resource capacity you request. You can also use the CreateDBInstanceReadReplica API to create a Read Replica for a given source DB Instance deployment.
  
• ModifyDBInstance — Modify settings for a running DB Instance. This lets you use a single API call to scale the resources available to your DB Instance in response to the load on your database, or change how it is automatically backed up and maintained on your behalf, or convert your DB Instance to or from a Multi-AZ deployment. You can also use this API to gain optional control over minor version upgrades for your DB Instance – maintain compatibility with specific versions, test new versions with your application before deploying in production, and perform version upgrades on your own terms and timelines.
  
• DeleteDBInstance — Delete a running DB Instance. With Amazon RDS, you can terminate your DB Instance at any time and pay only for the resources you used.
  
• CreateDBSnapshot — Generate a snapshot of your DB Instance. You can restore your DB Instance to these user-created snapshots at any point, even to reinstate a previously deleted DB Instance.
  
• RestoreDBInstanceToPointInTIme — Create a new DB Instance from a point-in-time backup. You can restore to any point within the retention period you specified, usually up to the last five minutes of your database’s usage.
• CreateDBInstanceReadReplica — Create a DB Instance that acts as a Read Replica of a source DB instance.