What is Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL ?

Easier, managed deployments

It takes only a few steps in the AWS Management Console to launch and connect to a production-ready PostgreSQL database in minutes. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database instances are preconfigured with parameters and settings for the server type you have selected. Database parameter groups provide granular control and fine-tuning of your PostgreSQL database.

Fast, predictable storage

Amazon RDS provides two SSD-backed storage options for your PostgreSQL database. General Purpose storage provides cost-effective storage for small or medium-sized workloads. For high-performance OLTP applications, Provisioned IOPS delivers consistent performance of up to 40,000 IOs per second. As your storage requirements grow you can provision additional storage on the fly with zero downtime.

Backup and recovery

The automated backup feature of Amazon RDS enables recovery of your PostgreSQL database instance to any point in time within your specified retention period of up to 35 days. In addition, you can perform user-initiated backups of your DB Instance. These full database backups will be stored by Amazon RDS until you explicitly delete them.

High availability and read replicas

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments provide enhanced availability and durability for your PostgreSQL databases, making them a natural fit for production database workloads. Amazon RDS Read Replicas make it easier to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single database instance for read-heavy database workloads.

Monitoring and metrics

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL provides Amazon CloudWatch metrics for your database instances at no additional charge and Amazon RDS Enhanced Monitoring provides access to over 50 CPU, memory, file system, and disk I/O metrics. View key operational metrics in the AWS Management Console, including compute/memory/storage capacity utilization, I/O activity, and instance connections.

Isolation and security

As a managed service, Amazon RDS provides a high level of security for your PostgreSQL databases. These include network isolation using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), encryption at rest using keys you create and control through AWS Key Management Service (KMS) and encryption of data in transit using SSL.

Amazon RDS is free to try. Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. You can pay for Amazon RDS using On-Demand or Reserved Instances. Amazon RDS provides a selection of instance types optimized to fit different relational database use cases.