Streamline Amazon RDS management with consolidation techniques – Part 1

This article explains strategies for consolidating Amazon RDS databases to reduce operational complexity and costs while managing associated risks.

• Database consolidation reduces hardware, licensing, and maintenance costs while improving resource utilization
• Consolidation concentrates risk; failures can affect multiple applications simultaneously
• Resource planning tools vary by engine: Oracle Resource Manager, Aurora Serverless, SQL Server Resource Governor, Db2 workload management
• High availability solutions (multi-AZ, read replicas, Aurora) operate at instance level, affecting all consolidated databases
• Selective replication available via MySQL/MariaDB filters, PostgreSQL logical replication, SQL Server replication, Oracle GoldenGate
• Security requires meticulous user, role, and schema management; IAM authentication available for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL
• Backup and restore operate at instance level; single database recovery requires manual export/import
• Cost allocation challenging; combine Performance Insights and AWS Cost and Usage Reports for per-database visibility

Part 1 establishes consolidation fundamentals; Part 2 introduces RDS Consolidator tool for planning consolidation scenarios.