Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It frees you up to focus on your apps so you can give them the better performance, availability, security, and compatibility they need. Amazon RDS is available on 6 familiar database instances: Amazon Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database and SQL Server engines. This means that the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing databases can be used with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period and enabling point-in-time recovery. You benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance via a single API call. In addition, Amazon RDS makes it easy to use replication to enhance availability and reliability for production databases. Amazon RDS for MySQL also enables you to scale out beyond the capacity of a single database deployment for read-heavy database workloads. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.