Using MySQL on Amazon RDS

For an introduction on what is Amazon RDS, please refer to What is Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

AWS Free Tier includes 750hrs of Micro DB Instance each month for one year, 20GB of Storage, and 20GB for Backups with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).


Create a DB Security Group

In the RDS UI console, click on DB Security Groups on the left sidebar.

Click Create DB Security Group

Fill in the name and description. (Ex. Name=blog, Description=wordpress blog)

Select the newly created Security Group.

In the bottom half of the screen (the description tab), choose EC2 Security Group for the drop down box and select the desired EC2 Security Group.


Launch a RDS instance

In the RDS UI console, click on DB Instances on the left sidebar.

Click Launch a DB Instance.

Select MySQL Community Edition.

Fill in the database specs.

If you want 24/7 availability, you would want Multi-AZ deployment. But it would cost more.

For this parameter...	...Do this:
License Model	Select the default, General-Public-License, to use the general license agreement for MySQL.
DB Engine Version	Select 5.5.20 to use the default version of MySQL. Note that RDS supports additional versions of MySQL.
DB Instance Class	Select db.m1.small to select a configuration that equates to 1.7 GB memory, 1 ECU (1 virtual core with 1 ECU), 64-bit platform, and moderate I/O capacity. for more information about the capacity for all the DB Instance class options, see Amazon Relational Database Service Features.
Multi-AZ Deployment	Select No to not request that your database be made available in multiple availability zones. For more information about multiple availability zones, see the RDS documentation.
Auto Minor Version Upgrade	Select Yes to enable your DB Instance to receive minor DB Engine version upgrades automatically when they become available.
Allocated Storage	Type 5 to allocate 5 GB of storage for your database. In some cases, allocating a higher amount of storage for your DB Instance than the size of your database can improve I/O performance. For more information about storage allocation, see Amazon Relational Database Service Features.
Use Provisioned IOPS	Leave the check box unselected. This option turns on Provisioned IOPS (I/O operations per second), a high-performance storage option in RDS that is optimized for I/O-intensive, transactional (OLTP) database workloads. For more information about high performance storage, see Provisioned IOPS.
DB Instance Identifier	Type a name for the DB Instance that is unique for your account in the region you selected. You may chose to add some intelligence to the name such as including the region and DB Engine you selected, for example west2-mysql-instance1.
Master User Name	Type a name using alphanumeric characters that you will use as the master user name to log on to your DB Instance with all database privileges.
Master User Password	Type a password that contains from 8 to 16 printable ASCII characters (excluding /,", and @) for your master user password.

Click continue to Additional Configuration.

Fill in the database name. For Availability Zone, choose the same region that your EC2 instance is at. This will speed up the connection and also not induce any cross-region fees.

Select the DB Security Group that we created in the previous section.

Click continue to Management Options.

Enable Automatic Backups, and set the Backup Retention Period to your desired days. A retention period of 7 days means that the daily backup will be deleted after 7 days. That also means there will be 7 backups at anytime.

Review the information in the next screen and launch the DB instance.