Book Image

AWS Certified Database – Specialty (DBS-C01) Certification Guide

By : Kate Gawron
5 (1)
Book Image

AWS Certified Database – Specialty (DBS-C01) Certification Guide

5 (1)
By: Kate Gawron

Overview of this book

The AWS Certified Database – Specialty certification is one of the most challenging AWS certifications. It validates your comprehensive understanding of databases, including the concepts of design, migration, deployment, access, maintenance, automation, monitoring, security, and troubleshooting. With this guide, you'll understand how to use various AWS databases, such as Aurora Serverless and Global Database, and even services such as Redshift and Neptune. You’ll start with an introduction to the AWS databases, and then delve into workload-specific database design. As you advance through the chapters, you'll learn about migrating and deploying the databases, along with database security techniques such as encryption, auditing, and access controls. This AWS book will also cover monitoring, troubleshooting, and disaster recovery techniques, before testing all the knowledge you've gained throughout the book with the help of mock tests. By the end of this book, you'll have covered everything you need to pass the DBS-C01 AWS certification exam and have a handy, on-the-job desk reference guide.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to Databases on AWS
Free Chapter
2
Chapter 1: AWS Certified Database – Specialty Overview
5
Part 2: Workload-Specific Database Design
12
Part 3: Deployment and Migration and Database Security
16
Part 4: Monitoring and Optimization
20
Part 5: Assessment
21
Chapter 16: Exam Practice

Understanding RDS Enhanced Monitoring

CloudWatch offers limited monitoring of the virtual machine or host that your RDS instances run on. To get a deeper and more accurate view, you need to enable RDS Enhanced Monitoring. This installs a small agent onto the RDS host that obtains and sends OS metrics back to CloudWatch up to every 1 second.

You can use these metrics in conjunction with database-level monitoring to get a highly accurate view of the real-time workload of your database. This can be very useful if you need to decide to increase an instance class to overcome a performance issue. By using Enhanced Monitoring, you can more accurately see whether the bottleneck is at the host level and, therefore, you would benefit from increasing the instance class or not.

Enabling Enhanced Monitoring also allows you to view OS metrics from within the RDS dashboard, which reduces the need for your databases to have access to CloudWatch. The following figure shows some of the metrics...