Create a relational database using AWS RDS for your personal project

https://images.edrawsoft.com/images2020/icon/amazon-rds.jpg

Attention

Amazon RDS is not recommended for your life-time project since it offers only 750 hours runtime per month as part of the Free Tier. Further above this amount may cost you up to $100 a month. ($0.26/hour — Frankfurt — MariaDB — 2024.06.13 rate)
For more info: https://aws.amazon.com/free

Let’s start.

1. Easy create
2. MariaDB (for the sake of this tutorial)
3. Free Tier
4. DB instance identifier: usually your project name
5. Master username: no need to change “admin”
6. Self managed
7. Auto generate password: recommended to have a secure and complex password, you can save it in your password manager later
8. Leave everything else as is and click Create database

Copy and save the password because you will never be able to see it again!

Wait until the status becomes “Available”

At this point, any attempt to connect to the DB will fail:

Barkeeper Studio

Tip: In case you don’t remember, “Master username” can be found in Configuration (tab) >> Availability (section)

… because of 2 reasons:

1. “Publicly accessible” should be set to Yes: defines whether or not the DB can be accessible from outside of the “virtual network” (Check out this video if you wanna learn more about VPC)
2. VPC security group should be configured by adding inbound rules

Let’s start with the first one:

Under the “Connectivity” section, click “Additional configuration” and then select “Publicly accessible”

Wait until it gets “Available”

Now the second step:

Yes, the warning’s got a point.
If your ISP provides you a “static IP” or you are already willing to reset the “Source” before each time you wanna connect, then you can go ahead and select “My IP” for better security. However, since this is a tutorial intended for “personal projects”, I think we can ignore it.

Now, let’s try again:

Test resulted success. Congrats!