Data layer

It's safe to say that most web applications today have some data store, whether it's a relational database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLServer, and so on), a non-relational database (MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, and so on), or even static file storage (S3, OS filesystem, and so on).

AWS RDS service will manage a PostgreSQL database for our coffee cupping application. RDS offers different RDBMS choices, most notably PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and SQLServer. There are other choices, and I encourage you to take a look at the various offerings. For this exercise, we'll be using a standard PostgreSQL database hosted on RDS. Many configuration options come with RDS, which we won't cover. Just know that it's possible and quite simple to run, configure, and manage a high-availability RDBMS instance using RDS. Other PaaS providers offer similar services for relational databases.