In part four of the series_._ We will learn about Databases. Here is part one , part two and part three. Make sure you follow Hackernoon and me (Febin John James) so that you won’t miss the later part of the series.
Database
Consider you are hosting a food delivery service. It would need you to maintain the data of your users, restaurants etc. So that you can fetch information like food ordered by an user, list of restaurants that are registered with you etc. A database helps in storing and querying these data.
Self hosting a database will require you to hire expensive database engineers. AWS takes the heavy lifting of maintaining database for you. You pay for what you use.
AWS RDS
AWS RDS (Relational Database Service) helps you to setup relational databases like MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, Postgre SQL and Amazon Aurora with a few clicks.
Relational Database are based on relational algebra. It allows you to link data from different tables. If your apps need you to maintain complicated links between different data. Stick to this.
AWS DynamoDB
This is a non-relational database. If you have huge amount of data , non relational database can help you achieve scale seamlessly. It is used by services like Lyft, Duolingo etc.
Some companies use both relational and non-relational databased for specific needs. Here is a comparison of both.
AWS ElastiCache
Consider you are querying email id of an user x. This query can be repetitive. So engineers invented cache system where once a query is performed the result is stored in cache. The next time same query is made, information is served from cache.
Cache is engineered to fetch information faster with less costs compared to a database. This helps improve performance of your application and reduce costs.
AWS ElastiCache allows you to easily deploy the cache system. This is used by popular companies like Airbnb, Adobe, etc
AWS Redshift
Data warehouse is a relational database build for analysis. It helps drive business decisions. Self hosting a data warehouse is difficult and costly. AWS Redshift takes the heavy lifting of hosting the data warehouse for you. This also seamlessly integrates with popular business intelligence tools. It is used by companies like Pinterest, Nokia, etc
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