After the great success of our course Storage on AWS, I am really happy that we are just publishing a brand new course focused on Databases on AWS, an extremely interesting topic for many of you out there. This course is quite a long one and we decided to split it into two parts: Introduction to Databases on AWS (Part 1) has just been published, and SimpleDB as an easy alternative to DynamoDB (Part 2) is out now.

AWS has so many different Databases services. From RDS, the traditional RDBMS, to ElastiCache, an in-memory caching system; from DynamoDB, the most important cloud NoSQL service, to RedShift, aimed at data warehouse: there are so many different flavors to choose from. Therefore it is important to have a clear mind about the options available, their pros and cons. This course is all about having a good overview of all the solutions for Databases on AWS, with a quick introduction to understanding all the features, the data models and the characteristics of each of it, and some hands-on videos to have a good idea of how to use each and every one of them.

Databases on AWS: part 1

The first lecture is a general introduction to the whole “Databases on AWS” landscape. It’s a nice overview of what you will see in the following lectures. The next two lectures will be about RDS. It is a managed Relational Database Service, probably the most important DB service on AWS. It can use many engines like the popular MySQL and Postgres, so you definitely want to know everything about it. After that, a round of quizzes to help you stick in memory all the main concepts you learned so far.

The next two lectures are about DynamoDB. The NoSQL movement is finding more and more enthusiasts and is being used in many different situations, thanks to its many advantages and the lack of a schema, that allows for a huge degree of flexibility. It doesn’t come without many serious downsides, yet it’s a very interesting technology and is here to stay. DynamoDB is the main NoSQL database in the AWS world and will be covered in full details by our instructor. You will see the key concepts of its data model and will see how to create and access data in DynamoDB during the practical example. After that, another round of quizzes about DynamoDB will complete your learning experience.

The second part of Databases on AWS will be about the remaining 3 services: Elasticache, SimpleDB and Redshift, and is out already! In the meantime, if you want to learn more about RDS and DynamoDB, check out Cloud Academy’s AWS quizzes, and take a look at the exclusive RDS Hands-on Lab that we launched a few days ago. It will help you learn using RDS by doing real things on real cloud resources, helped by our lab technology, that will track your progress and will also help you if you are stuck at something.