How it works...

The preceding task will create (using a parameter command) a MySQL database instance with a disk size of 10 GB and a compute size of m1.small. The instance type defines the computation power of the instance, which can be changed depending upon the use case. We have also defined a few parameters that ensure the admin user is created with the appropriate credentials and an appropriate security group is applied. We have also defined a backup retention window. This ensures that we can restore the database, if required, from anywhere up to the last seven days of backup.

We should note that the security group we used here is the same security group that we generated in the previous chapter. One of the great features of an RDS instance is its high availability; even during maintenance (software or hardware), RDS can reduce the risks of downtime significantly by using a multi-availability zone (multi-az) feature. With multi-az, AWS runs multiple replicas of the database instance in different availability zones that can be promoted to master seamlessly during maintenance, downtime, or reboots of the master.