How to create AWS Relational Database - The ultimate 11 Steps

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is a web service which helps in setting-up, operating and scaling the relational database in the cloud. The service is cost-efficient and can be used by industries for database administration tasks.

In this post, we will look at the detailed steps involved in creating an RDS database (MySQL) instance that helps maintain the data which is used by a web application.

Pre-requisites

A VPC with private and public subnets has to be set up, and it should have respective security groups associated with it.  

Steps to create an RDS instance

Following are the steps to create an RDS Instance: 

1. Sign into AWS Management Console.  
2. Open the RDS console.  
3. In the upper-right corner, choose the region where you wish to create your instance.  
4. In the navigation pane, click on ‘Databases’.  
5. Click on ‘Create database’.  
6. Make sure ‘Standard create’ is chosen, then click on MySQL (or the database which you wish to create an RDS database instance).  

    Below is the snip that shows this operation.

Image credit: aws.amazon.com

7. In the ‘Templates’ tab, click on the ‘Dev/Test’ option.  
8. In the ‘Setting’ tab, set the following values:

• DB instance identifier
• Master username
• Auto Generate a password
• Master password
• Confirm password

9. In the ‘DB instance size’ option, give a value for the following variables:

• DB instance performance types
• DB instance class

10. In the ‘Storage’ and ‘Availability & durability’ section, leave the default values as is.
11. In the ‘Connectivity’ section, click on the ‘Additional connectivity configuration’ and set the below values in it:

• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• Subnet group
• Publicly accessible- No
• VPC security groups
• Availability zone- No preference
• Database port- 3306

   The same is displayed in the below screenshot:

12. Click on the ‘Additional configuration’tab, and provide a name for the ‘Initial database name’ variable. The default settings for other options need to be kept the same.
13. Now click on ‘Create database’.
14. It takes a few minutes for the instance to get created. It can be seen in the ‘Databases’ list as ‘Creating’.
15. Once it is created, it shows as ‘Available’.
16. The ‘Endpoint’ and ‘Port’ of the database instance can be viewed in the ‘Connectivity & security’ section.

Note: Make sure that your database instance is secure, by verifying that sources outside of the VPC can’t connect to the RDS database instance.

Conclusion

In this post, we understood how an RDS database instance can be created.