Other Amazon database services
While Amazon does a great job of providing AMIs for building database services, they also provide these services in a pre-packaged ready-to-use form called RDS.
Amazon RDS
We covered Amazon's Relational Database Service (RDS) briefly in Chapter 2, Mapping your Enterprise Requirements Against Amazon's Offerings. RDS is a database service provided by Amazon where they take on the management and operation of the database instance on your behalf.
In this section, we will detail how to set up an RDS instance and manage it.
Setting up the RDS service
To begin the setup, firstly you will need to sign up for the RDS Service.
You will be prompted with the now familiar pricing page, this time for Amazon RDS. Click Complete Sign Up and continue.
You will need to wait for your subscription to become active; however, this only takes a minute or two.
RDS pricing
Pricing for RDS is similar to other AWS pricing, in that it is charged by the hour based on your usage. To give an indication...