I'm currently taking an "Introduction to Cloud Computing" course through AWS Educate and stumbled upon a section stating that Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is categorized under IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). I need some clarity on this because I always thought databases would fit better under PaaS (Platform as a Service). Can someone explain why RDS falls under the infrastructure category instead of being considered a platform service?
5 Answers
I lean towards viewing RDS as IaaS. They provide just the database itself, not much else. However, with Aurora, there’s a lot more included, which starts to blur the lines and feel like a platform service.
RDS sits in a bit of a gray area. Many people consider it a managed DB service that straddles IaaS and PaaS. In fact, something like Amazon Aurora Serverless 2 is a closer match to PaaS compared to traditional RDS. So yeah, RDS offers database management that leans towards IaaS, but it’s a bit more nuanced than that.
This is a tricky one! AWS doesn’t stress the XaaS terminology too much. RDS resembles managed infrastructure since it offers provisioning like EC2, but it’s a specialized service under that umbrella. I’d say EventBridge is more of a platform since it revolves around messaging.
I'd categorize RDS as IaaS too—it's a managed database, whereas adding something like an EC2 instance connected to it might bring it closer to PaaS. Just remember that this stuff is subjective, and focus more on what the exam materials say for your tests.
From my perspective, RDS is more of a PaaS. It's designed to make database management easier than if you were to configure everything from scratch, so I think it should be seen that way.
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