Take a look at Amazon Cloud. It is a large set of tools like Relational Database Service (RDS) and MySQL Database. These are only two of the many features that Amazon provides, but these are the two I am going to talk about today.

RDS can be used with Oracle, MySQL and multiple other types of database servers already at your fingertips. Personally, my favorite parts of RDS are the features it provides, like scalability and the ability to restore an instance almost immediately, compared to trying to restore or fix a server that crashed.

Let’s say your dedicated server crashes, and you can no longer access your site. For a dedicated server, you have to hope that you have a backup. Otherwise, you’re stuck trying to restore the server in hopes that you can keep your data. With RDS, Amazon will automatically backup your database based on the retention period you set. So if you RDS server crashes, you can just launch a new RDS instance with your last backup. Your site will quickly be up again and serving web pages.

Scalability is usually another concern of any application that is growing. Databases are almost always the bottleneck of any application. To attempt to overcome this issue, you have to either purchase more computers or scale out your database. That isn’t easy, and it takes time. But with RDS, you can do this just by changing a few settings. You can easily increase the space needed to store your data. In addition, you can change how much processing power and memory your application needs. As a result this task, can go from weeks of work to 30 minutes of clicking.

Overall, these types of features in Amazon Cloud give it an advantage over other comparable services. In my next post, I’ll cover a few more benefits that Amazon Cloud provides.