Amazon RDS Staging vs Production DB

Question

What is the best method for setting up distinct Production and Staging databases in Amazon RDS? Is it advisable to spin up one RDS instance for Production and another for Staging and keep them entirely separate, or does it work just as well to just use one RDS instance with a Production database and a Staging database?

Answer 1

This purely depends on how you intend to use the Environments ( or what you intend to use ) and pretty much nothing in the technology implications of the RDS.

The easiest way would be to have individual RDS instances and direct advantages would be

1. separation of concerns
2. Ability to scale the environments individually ( i.e. to do stress test load test the environment - you can make the PROD instance to be a xlarge and the staging could be mirco )

You need to understand that the costing implication would at least 2x; the other approach would be to create different databases in the same instance and treat / consider them as individual environments