We use RDS with PostgreSQL and MySQL as our backend database for our Application hosted in AWS, they are located in a private VPC and only allow access from our backend subnet.

RDS allows us easy to create and manage a relational database for our Application hosted in AWS. It supports many different instance type, engine and scale option to select. RDS works well with VPC to keep our database private and only allow to access from specify sources. It has a lot of monitor metrics such as CPU utilization, free storage, freeable memory and read/write latency and well notification system to keep track of our database. Excellent backup, snapshot and restore support by AWS

Manage RDS's parameter is quite complex since it does not have good UI support. It lacks support tool to run SQL command directly from AWS console

We use Amazon RDS to manage our key production/transactional databases for our customer-facing applications as well as our development environment, internal ERP, etc. We definitely gain value and efficiency from not having to deal with the management of yet another server - and its operating system, patches, uptime, etc. - it is a real boon to simply have a database-as-a-service that we spin up, connect to, and work with, letting AWS deal with all the management.

AWS RDS allows us to deploy databases easily and efficiently with great resilience, scalability, and security - but without having to deal with managing a server. RDS makes it easy to spin up a new database, have multi-availability zone replicas, back it up, and do many other things. It's also dead easy to upgrade software versions - simply let AWS look after it.

Being a managed database service there are restrictions; for instance, with SQL Server you don't have the sysadmin role and you can't set any trace flag you want. You can adjust a number of parameters in the RDS console but only those which AWS have explicitly added support for. There are other caveats and restrictions for other DBMS products too. Another thing I don't like is when you change your instance size it takes a long time - but at least there's no downtime. Also, tooling is restricted. A lot of great tools to dig into performance and query tracing won't work with the AWS caveats so you have to use the AWS RDS console and logs and it can be more tedious to really drill into application performance bottlenecks.

Amazon RDS is really simple and lightweight. It is easy to use and scale up in the cloud. Easy to setup.

I have not used Amazon Relational Database extensively, so I did not find any drawbacks forAmazon Relational Database.

Overall, Amazon RDS has been very useful to us. It has saved us tremendous amounts of time just in the provisioning, scaling, and maintenance activities alone.

I like how easy it is to scale RDS up and down alongside its monitoring features which can be conveniently accessed via AWS console.

The burst balance limit for the underlying EBS disk gave us lots of problems. I wish this feature was more user-friendly.