Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) vs. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon RDS
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) from Amazon Web Services.N/A
Amazon S3
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.N/A
Pricing
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Editions & Modules
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
$0.24 ($0.48)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for MariaDB
$0.25 ($0.50)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for MySQL
$0.29 ($0.58)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for Oracle
$0.482 ($0.964)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for SQL Server
$1.02 ($1.52)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon RDSAmazon S3
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Considered Both Products
Amazon RDS
Chose Amazon RDS
AWS RDS supports many engines and is more efficient than just MySQL.
Chose Amazon RDS
It was based on previous experience and a few things that are good about AWS, like S3 and Lambda, the ease of integrating AWS's in-house services, and, of course, support. So, our organization has decided to use AWS.
Chose Amazon RDS
The AWS relational database service was selected because at the early stages of the implementation of the company product the team didn't have a lot of experience in creating and configuring database inside the company cluster, but there was a need to have a relation database, …
Chose Amazon RDS
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) stands out among similar products due to its seamless integration with other AWS services, automated backups, and multi-AZ deployments for high availability. Its support for various database engines, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and …
Chose Amazon RDS
In a few words, we are just to confortable working with oracle and sql server. Using RDS add another layer of distributed database in order to backup everything we have in case of a disaster and also complies with authorities locally and internacionally. All database we use, …
Chose Amazon RDS
Deploying PostgreSQL by yourself may appear easy at first but running a production PostgreSQL cluster with millions of records is a hard task, especially for compliance, scalability, and security. RDS automates all complex tasks so you can focus on building your database schema …
Chose Amazon RDS
RDS Provides broader range of database engine. Well integration capabilities with third party makes it unique
Chose Amazon RDS
With products like Google Cloud SQL, Azure SQL Database, AWS RDS stacks up quite well in all features. Features like licensing, performance, security comes to my mind the most. Another aspect is AWS's global reach.
Chose Amazon RDS
There are a lot of factor we took into consideration the most important ones are: Ease of use and setup - Compared to other similar options Amazon RDS is very easy to setup just clicking few options and its ready for POC and for production very easy and flexible Terraform …
Chose Amazon RDS
With the latest serverless technology Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) has an edge over all its competitors, it works really fast with high log retention.
Chose Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS supports a wider range of database engines, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and Amazon Aurora (MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible) than Google Cloud SQL. When compared to Google Cloud SQL, AWS provides a larger global footprint with …
Chose Amazon RDS
Mongodb is nosql database and some clients prefer it. In our presentation we try to persuade them to use RDS with its pros and cons. The type of selection depends upon the actual need.
Chose Amazon RDS
Although the Rackspace service is not comparable, even though it is very good, it requires a lot of administration on my part.
Regarding Atlas, although it is not the same as RDS in terms of provisioning and administration panel, I mention it because I found it simpler and more …
Chose Amazon RDS
Previously used Media Temple database hosting (now GoDaddy). While that endeavor was also successful, the AWS RDS is more secure, with higher availability and better documentation.
Chose Amazon RDS
We have a strong preference for AWS managed services, and we find that RDS offers excellent integration with various AWS services, making it a seamless choice for our infrastructure. Furthermore, RDS supports integration with automation tools such as Terraform, enhancing our …
Chose Amazon RDS
The main area that stuck out to me in looking at AWS RDS compared to Azure Data Lake Storage was still that RDS is simple to get up and running with over its competitors. The only negative and it holds true for both solutions is that can both be hard to estimate cost control …
Chose Amazon RDS
RDS seems to be the best cross-section between cost, availability, deployment and throughput.
Chose Amazon RDS
Also ElephantSQL. Not as cost effective, but more integrated into our cloud environment.
Chose Amazon RDS
During the migration from MySQL installed on Linux to AWS RDS, we were almost surprised as it was done by few clicks rather than too much configurations ans steps in case of traditional DB migrations. In no time our platform was up and running.
Chose Amazon RDS
Installing, configuring, and managing Oracle Database can be challenging, especially for people who are new to Oracle products. Longer learning curves and higher operational overhead can be caused by this complexity. Amazon Relational Database Service is easy to understand and …
Chose Amazon RDS
We consider initially only to have the back up product. After analysing different products, we realize that we needed a more complete and robust product such as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Then, the option to hire Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) was …
Chose Amazon RDS
1: If your company is already deeply involved in the AWS ecosystem, such as AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, or Amazon Redshift, leveraging Amazon RDS might result in a more seamless integration of services. AWS offers a broad set of cloud services, which makes it easier to design and …
Chose Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS excels with its widely adopted and mature ecosystem, supporting various database engines. While Azure SQL Database offers a tiered pricing structure and automatic patching, and Cloud SQL provides straightforward pricing and easy scaling, Amazon RDS's extensive …
Amazon S3
Chose Amazon S3
S3 is excellent but has a different use case than ebs. As ebs can be used as a filesystem, s3 bucket stores objects
Chose Amazon S3
Due to the best integration between other AWS services my company already used, S3 was the logic choice.
Chose Amazon S3
We opted for Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) solution as most of our workloads run on AWS and this saves as bandwidth costs. Otherwise the solutions are similar in capabilities for our needs.
Chose Amazon S3
Amazon S3 integrates way better with other AWS services and tools, making it the quick choice for your AWS based application. Furthermore, the pricing for Amazon S3 is very competitive and it has all the security and access capabilities to enable your application.
Google …
Chose Amazon S3
Pricing and Cost Structure are best:Amazon S3:Offers multiple storage classes: Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA (Infrequent Access), One Zone-IA, Glacier, and Glacier Deep Archive while other were costly and figuring out the monthly costs were difficult. The …
Chose Amazon S3
Amazon S3 has so much other functionality than it's competitors with so many more use cases. We use One Drive, Drop Box, Teams, Google Drive and other products for basic file sharing while working with partners and clients but that's kind of the extent of those products. S3 …
Chose Amazon S3
More robust and feature rich. Also more cost effective. However, the other options do lend themselves to be better at user friendliness. But if your technological and willing to look up help in the support knowledgebase you will do just fine and get a better product at …
Chose Amazon S3
When we were implementation the solution of our issue then we find Azure and Google Cloud Storage platforms but we were unable to find the proper documentation for the platform as compared to S3, So we moved to S3 and discarded the other options. Cost wise there are only some …
Chose Amazon S3
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is the only AWS offering for object storage. DynamoDB is fantastic for unstructured data but does not handle object storage. The relational database service (RDS) is excellent but only applies to use cases with structured table data, and does …
Chose Amazon S3
Linode and Google Cloud Storage
Chose Amazon S3
All other alternatives are also good but as our infrastructure was on AWS, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) was a better choice due to its better integration with other AWS services. It was serving the purpose in an economical way. All of our needs were being fulfilled by …
Chose Amazon S3
Amazon S3 is the business driving arrangement by Amazon Web Services. It has answers for all startup's and huge venture. The expense viability is one reason that I have chosen the Amazon S3 over other
Chose Amazon S3
We are an AWS shop, thus it is much easier to use with other AWS services. It may not always be the cheapest but once you are in AWS if you can decouple your apps and use this as one of your services it will certainly make developer's life easier and admin life easier.
Chose Amazon S3
S3 is the most mature simple storage service on the web. It has direct competitors from Google and Azure, as well as a bunch of other competitors that focus on different aspects. For example, Backblaze specializes on file backups, and while s3 can also be used for that, …
Chose Amazon S3
We had already decided to use Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for other compute services, so it made sense to use Amazon for blob storage as well. By using the same cloud vendor, we can more easily integrate between AWS services like Cloudfront. Blob storage is essentially a …
Chose Amazon S3
Amazon S3 provides a variety of tools for uploading short and large objects to the cloud. AWS S3 is a key-value store, one of the major categories of NoSQL databases used for accumulating voluminous, mutating, unstructured, or semistructured data. S3 object retrieval is fast. …
Chose Amazon S3
They're both great. I really don't know the differences, but both have the same basic set of features, in my opinion. But, S3 is widely know as a greater tool, safer, and much easier. Also, it's used by and compatible with a lot of applications around the world. That made us …
Chose Amazon S3
I think [Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)] is cheaper than Azure Blob Storage (at least at the time I selected it). It is a low maintenance product and it is more reliable.
Chose Amazon S3
The main differences are that S3 files can be accessed publicly without having an account on the service so it is suitable for website assets, but the other services have desktop hard drive syncing applications so they are more suitable for sharing files to other staff in the …
Chose Amazon S3
Google Cloud Storage provides many of the same features as Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), but they differ quite a bit in the database integrations they provide. The main reason we had to use Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is because our main infrastructure cloud …
Chose Amazon S3
AWS probably has the most difficult UI to learn but it's the far better service.
Google is probably second but it has storage limitations and there are some security concerns (still a good tool for collaboration)
The Microsoft products are the worst IMO. They're slow and have the …
Chose Amazon S3
Most of our customers are on AWS so it's easy for us to integrate it with AWS S3 and we could deliver our projects on or before the expected time.
Chose Amazon S3
Amazon S3 is more cost-effective then what Microsoft Azure offers.
Features
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Data Center Backup
Comparison of Data Center Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
-
Ratings
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
9.0
Ratings
8% above category average
Universal recovery00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Instant recovery00 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Recovery verification00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Business application protection00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Multiple backup destinations00 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Incremental backup identification00 Ratings9.30 Ratings
Backup to the cloud00 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Deduplication and file compression00 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Snapshots00 Ratings9.50 Ratings
Flexible deployment00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Management dashboard00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Platform support00 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Retention options00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Encryption00 Ratings9.80 Ratings
Enterprise Backup
Comparison of Enterprise Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
-
Ratings
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
8.8
Ratings
7% above category average
Continuous data protection00 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Replication00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Operational reporting and analytics00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Malware protection00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Multi-location capabilities00 Ratings9.50 Ratings
Ransomware Recovery00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
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User Ratings
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.4
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
7.6
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.6
(0 ratings)
9.8
(0 ratings)
Online Training
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Likelihood to Recommend
If your application needs a relational data store and uses other AWS services, AWS RDS is a no-brainer. It offers all the traditional database features, makes it a snap to set up, creates cross-region replication, has advanced security, built-in monitoring, and much more at a very good price. You can also set up streaming to a data lake using various other AWS services on your RDS.
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For archiving old data that is infrequently accessed it is perfect. You can choose to let it go into cold/glacier storage which saves even further costs but at the expense of accessibility. I like that you can set access rules to automatically move it to the next storage tier after a certain amount of time that it has not been accessed. I also use it a lot with PHP via the API. We have some custom in-house applications that have a fair amount of data uploaded into them. S3 has been a perfect solution to store these files, taking the load off web servers and never having issues with running out of storage.
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Pros
  • Automated Database Management: We use it for streamlining routine tasks like software patching and database backups.
  • Scalability on Demand: we use it to handle traffic spikes, scaling both vertically and horizontally.
  • Database Engine Compatibility: It works amazingly with multiple database engines used by different departments within our organization including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle.
  • Monitoring: It covers our extensive monitoring and logging, and also has great compatibility with Amazon CloudWatch
Read full review
  • Reliable and secure way to store objects in cloud: Storing any type of file(text, pdf, doc, csv, etc) is very easy with S3. Fetching this stored content as and when you require is also pretty easy and can be done using both the console and AWS CLI. Appropriate permissions can be set up for buckets using IAM roles/policies.
  • Versioning in buckets: S3 gives you a very handy feature to store multiple versions of objects stored in a bucket.
  • Lifecycle policies: You can set up lifecycle policies in S3 that can move your older objects to IA or Glacier. This setup is very easy and can be done within minutes for a bucket.
  • Replication: The cross-region replication that S3 provides is wonderful. Beware of the inter-regional data transfer costs though.
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Cons
  • It is a little difficult to configure and connect to an RDS instance. The integration with ECS can be made more seamless.
  • Exploring features within RDS is not very easy and intuitive. Either a human friendly documentation should be added or the User Interface be made intuitive so that people can explore and find features on their own.
  • There should be tools to analyze cost and minimize it according to the usage.
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  • The biggest problem is to rename the bucket. There is no direct way to do it. One need to copy entire content to the different bucket with intended bucket name and then remove the old bucket. Sometimes it creates issues.
  • There is no direct way to upload .zip file and extract it to inside the bucket.
  • While uploading large files, sometimes you will find a drop of upload speed. I observe it so many times and while checking my internet speed, I find it absolutely perfect. So there must have something wrong on the AWS side.
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Likelihood to Renew
We do renew our use of Amazon Relational Database Service. We don't have any problems faced with RDS in place. RDS has taken away lot of overhead of hosting database, managing the database and keeping a team just to manage database. Even the backup, security and recovery another overhead that has been taken away by RDS. So, we will keep on using RDS.
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Due to princing, availability and scalability.
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Usability
I've been using AWS Relational Database Services in several projects in different environments and from the AWS products, maybe this one together to EC2 are my favourite. They deliver what they promise. Reliable, fast, easy and with a fair price (in comparison to commercial products which have obscure license agreements).
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The UI could have some improvements (better filters) and there is a lack of some useful functionality, such as renaming an existing bucket: the latter is much needed in the context of rapidly evolving companies. Overall though, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is easy to use and to onboard people and tools to, thanks to its various APIs and flexibility.
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Support Rating
I have only had good experiences in working with AWS support. I will admit that my experience comes from the benefit of having a premium tier of support but even working with free-tier accounts I have not had problems getting help with AWS products when needed. And most often, the docs do a pretty good job of explaining how to operate a service so a quick spin through the docs has been useful in solving problems.
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It depends on your tier within Amazon on how great of support you get. For us we have a dedicated Point of Contact that is great in taking in what we need and discussing it with the S3 team. The best thing is features we need or suggest have a good chance of landing on their roadmap.
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Online Training
the online training & digital content available on the web from AWS was having sufficient information to deploy and run the service
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) stands out among similar products due to its seamless integration with other AWS services, automated backups, and multi-AZ deployments for high availability. Its support for various database engines, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle, provides flexibility. Additionally, RDS offers managed security features, including encryption and IAM integration, enhancing data protection. The pay-as-you-go pricing model makes it cost-effective. Overall, Amazon RDS excels in ease of use, scalability, and a comprehensive feature set, making it a top choice for organizations seeking a reliable and scalable managed relational database service in the cloud.
Read full review
S3 is the most mature simple storage service on the web. It has direct competitors from Google and Azure, as well as a bunch of other competitors that focus on different aspects. For example, Backblaze specializes on file backups, and while s3 can also be used for that, Backblaze provides a better price point in exchange for more focused functionality. S3 really shines in that it performs simple things astonishingly well, while also being flexible enough to stretch itself to other situations (data lakes, file mounts, backup/restores systems, web hosting, etc.).
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Return on Investment
  • The overall cost increases, but we spect this and we can mitigate other risks.
  • Is easy to work from the cloud. Is reliable, but we keep our local solution as well where RDS works quite good.
  • RDS allow us to focurs on owr objetives instead of the other matters regarding databases.
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  • Allows us to store large amounts of raw traffic from data providers to allow us to view data our systems received at particular times, in order to reconstruct inputs in case of errors
  • Is capable of storing very large amounts of data cheaply without material impact to our business
Read full review
ScreenShots

Amazon RDS Screenshots

Screenshot of A look inside the RDS console.