AWS Technical Essentials Practice

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) primarily manages relational databases. This service provides a fully managed environment for deploying and scaling relational databases in the cloud. It supports several popular database engines, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MariaDB, and Oracle.

The core functionality of Amazon RDS includes automated backup, patch management, monitoring, and capacity provisioning. These features streamline the process of setting up, operating, and scaling a relational database, allowing developers and businesses to focus on application development rather than database management tasks.

While other options like NoSQL databases, distributed database queries, and data lakes represent important considerations in data architecture, they are not the primary focus of Amazon RDS. NoSQL databases typically require different management solutions than those provided by RDS; therefore, solutions like Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon DocumentDB are designed specifically for those use cases. Similarly, data lakes, which handle unstructured data and enable big data analytics, are addressed by services such as Amazon S3 combined with tools like AWS Lake Formation or AWS Glue.