What is Amazon RDS?
Why Interviewers Ask This
Foundational questions like this help interviewers calibrate the rest of the interview. A confident, accurate answer signals that you have solid AWS / Cloud Computing basics — a prerequisite for any developer role.
Answer
Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is a managed relational database service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. AWS handles patching, backups, monitoring, and scaling. Supported engines: Amazon Aurora (MySQL/PostgreSQL compatible — proprietary, highest performance), MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server. Key features: (1) Automated backups: daily snapshots + transaction logs — point-in-time recovery within backup retention period (1-35 days); (2) Multi-AZ: synchronous standby replica in a different AZ — automatic failover in 1-2 minutes. For high availability, not for read scaling; (3) Read replicas: asynchronous copies for read scaling — up to 5 for MySQL/PostgreSQL. Can be promoted to standalone. Cross-region read replicas for global apps; (4) Encryption: at rest (AES-256 via KMS) and in transit (SSL/TLS); (5) Performance Insights: database performance monitoring; (6) Enhanced Monitoring: OS-level metrics; (7) Storage Auto Scaling: automatically increases storage when needed. Amazon Aurora: up to 5x faster than MySQL, 3x faster than PostgreSQL. Storage auto-grows in 10GB increments. 6 copies across 3 AZs. Aurora Global Database for cross-region. Aurora Serverless v2 for variable workloads. Instance classes: db.t3 (burstable, dev/test), db.m5/m6g (general purpose), db.r5/r6g (memory optimized for large databases). Pricing: instance hours + storage + I/O (Magnetic) + data transfer.
Pro Tip
This topic has AWS / Cloud Computing-specific nuances that differ from general programming. Highlighting those nuances in your answer shows expertise rather than generic knowledge.