RDS - Relational database service

RDS offloads the database administration

No direct host access

Each Db has a unique DB instance identifier

Supports

a) Oracle

b) Aurora

c) Postgres
d) MySQL
e) Maria
f) MS-SQL

RDS storage types

a) High performance OLTP - Provisioned IOPS

b) DB wokloads with moderate I/O - RDS Gneral purpose (SSD)

c) Small DB with infrequent I/O - RDS magnetic storage

Monitoring

Enhanced monitoring can be enabled for RDS

Backup

Automated backup’s are saved in S3
Manual

Read Replica

Can Create upto 5 Read replica;s

Cross region read –replica is supported

Primary switches to Standby  if any one of the following happens 

Primary DB instance fails

DB instance server type changed

OS of DB instance undergoing software patches

An AZ outage

Storage Failure

Loss of network connectivity

Failover time - 60-120 Sec. Large transaction can increase time

DB instances are not automatically backed up when an OS update is applied. So you should backup your DB instance before you apply an update.

In case of OS update is available in maintenance column, it will show available.

Zero loss failover from master to replica (mysql 5.6)