Use RDS or a container (ECS) for database? Advantages and disadvantages

Question

I want to host a database on AWS. RDS is one option but I have heard something about containers (and ECS). I see containers as useful for testing, but I'm uncertain about running a production database on one. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of each of them?

Answer 1

Run a database yourself on an EC2 instance:

• You choose the database
• You control all the configuration
• You control what else runs on that machine
• Backup, restoration, and other tasks can be customized
• You are wholly responsible for keeping the DB running
• You are wholly responsible for backups

Run a database on RDS:

• Limited selection of DBs
• You can run Aurora, Amazon's proprietary DB
• Some (few) configuration options are not permitted
• No access to the underlying machine
• Automatic backups
• Basic maintenance is automated
• You can't run a cheaper DB than the smallest machine Amazon will rent

Run a database inside a container on an EC2 instance:

All the advantages & disadvantages of running the DB yourself, plus

• You have to do some extra work to persist data across containers
• You can easily run the exact same DB setup for local development, in test, and in production
• You pay some additional overhead (small)
• Process isolation makes it easy to share a machine (maybe your entire workload is less than a t2.micro)

Running a DB in a container under ECS doesn't really get you advantages over managing the containers yourself. But if you're using ECS for the rest of your stack and you're putting the DB in a container, then you'd just want to use ECS for that also.