Do you know about Apsara for RDS?

What is RDS?

It’s a stable, reliable, and scalable online database service. It supports MySQL, SQL Server, PostreSQL, PPAS (highle compatible with Oracle), and MariaDB database engines. It also provides backup, restoration, monitoring, and migration as parts of Operation and Maintenance (O&M).

For advantages, you may have concern about cost and this service can be used to do cost-effective and it’s easy to use as well. Has high performance, high-available architecture and multiple disaster recovery solution, and high security standard to protect user’s data.

You can use some methods to handle RDS instances, like:

Using RDS Console
CLI
SDK
API Call

After creation, you can use Data Management Service (DMS) and the other client-tools such as MySQL Workbench, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or pgAdmin.

To access the service, you can easily find “Apsara for RDS” in list of services.

You see in the picture above, It has no instance yet. To create instance, just choose button “Create Instance“.

Create RDS Instance

You can see in there like billing method, region, database engine, edition, storage type, zone location, deployment method, instance type, capacity, vpc, vswitch, policy for upgrade minor version, and resource group. Finally, you need to confirm your order.

After order complete, it will create instance and we need to wait the status to be running for few minutes. We see that database engine we used is MySQL v8.0, billing method is Pay-As-You-Go, and VPC used and zone location for the short description. To open more information, click on the instance id (after the status is running).

You will see some menu on the left section like Basic Information, Accounts, Databases, Backup and Restoration, Database Connection, Monitoring and Alerts, Data Security, Logs, and Parameters. Also, you can find more like usage statistics, memory, maximum iops, instance type, etc.

Account Creation

After that, you can go to Accounts, and create the user to login to your database instance first. For database account, it’s similar to username. For Account Type, privilege account similar to root access and you need to define the scope if you choose standard account. For password, it’s your a secret, you can handle it i know. For description, it’s optional and you can let it as default. After creation, your account will be listed in the Accounts‘ menu.

Connect to Database Instance

Now, you can use the DMS to access your database instance, just go to “Log On to Database“. And to make sure, you can do “Test Connection” first.

I’ll try to exec some syntax and make fun with RDS by using DMS~

It looks awesome and you can look the execution result and execution history as well. It can be useful!

OK, let’s back again to RDS view. Now, if you go to menu Databases, you can see “_identity” in there. Why, because we already executed the syntax before. (Picture 8)

Backup and Restoration

You can also configure backup policy with this instance. Go to “Backup and Restoration” and select the Backup Settings. The default settings will create retention date 7 days, backup cycle in Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, Backup Time between 19.00 and 20.00. It also enable log backup with retention period equals to 7 days. You can do custom on it. If you want to restore data, just go to Data Backup and click restore by choosing specific time. If you want to download log info, just choose download in the specific time.

Manage Access

You are not try to access the instance via internet right?
** Nb. If you already know about this, you can skip this part.

In Database Connection, even you already enable the public access, if you don’t configure the whitelist, it won’t give the address of public endpoint. Choose Configure whitelist (it’s similar to go to Data Security and manage the whitelist). To make it public (without whitelist), you can set 0.0.0.0/0 but it’s just for educational purpose and not best practice.