Why do people recommend against using Amazon RDS?

Question

We currently run MySQL on EC2, and we have been for some time. I like the idea of simplified backups, recovery, and fail-over, and I'm really tempted by the apparent ease of using RDS instead of EC2. I've started the migration from EC2 to RDS, but as I work through the migration I keep wondering if I'm doing the right thing.

I've read people hinting against using Amazon RDS for MySQL databases, but I haven't found a concise explanation of the disadvantages of RDS.

Can someone help me understand why I should NOT move to RDS, but instead keep my data in EC2?

Our database is approximately 30GB of data, which is mostly from an 18-million row table and a 40-million row table in a single InnoDB database.

Any thoughts are much appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

This is mainly an issue with the DBA of the team.

RDS is aimed at removing most of the repetitive and boring tasks of DBA (mainly multi-AZ replication, backup, restore, patching...). This part can be even 70% of the time spent by DBAs.

On the other hand some tasks that DBA can do if they are running the DB on their instance (for example, on EC2), are not accessible with RDS, as they don't have ROOT on the RDS instance.

If your DBA (and your use case) can benefit from the heavy lifting and not suffer from the reduced privileges, you should certainly consider RDS.