Actually... for Postgres specifically, it's less than 5 minutes to do so in AWS and you get replication, disaster recovery and basic monitoring all included.
I hated having to deal with PostgreSQL on bare metal.
To answer your questions should someone ask these as well and wish answers:
> Does the IP of my cluster change? If so how to make it static?
Use the DNS entry that AWS gives you as the "endpoint", done. I think you can pin a stable Elastic IP to RDS as well if you wish to expose your RDS DB to the Internet although I have really no idea why one would want that given potential security issues.
> Also can non-aws servers connect to it? No?
You can expose it to the Internet in the creation web UI. I think the default the assistant uses is to open it to 0.0.0.0/0 but the last time I did that is many years past so I hope that AWS asks you about what you want these days.
>Then how to open up the firewall and allow it?
If the above does not, create a Security Group, assign the RDS server to that Security Group and create an Ingress rule that either only allows specific CIDRs or a blanket 0.0.0.0/0.
> And what happens if it uses too much resources? Does it shutdown by itself?
It just gets dog slow if your I/O quota is exhausted, it goes into an error state when the disk goes full. Expand your disk quota and the RDS database becomes accessible again.
> What if i wanna fine tune a config parameter? Do I ssh into it? Can i edit it in the UI?
No SSH at all, not even for manually unfucking something, for that you need the assistance of the AWS support - but in about six years I never had a database FUBAR'ing itself.
As for config parameters, there's an UI for this called "parameter/option groups", you can set almost all config parameters there, and you can use these as templates for other servers you need as well.
I hated having to deal with PostgreSQL on bare metal.
To answer your questions should someone ask these as well and wish answers:
> Does the IP of my cluster change? If so how to make it static?
Use the DNS entry that AWS gives you as the "endpoint", done. I think you can pin a stable Elastic IP to RDS as well if you wish to expose your RDS DB to the Internet although I have really no idea why one would want that given potential security issues.
> Also can non-aws servers connect to it? No?
You can expose it to the Internet in the creation web UI. I think the default the assistant uses is to open it to 0.0.0.0/0 but the last time I did that is many years past so I hope that AWS asks you about what you want these days.
>Then how to open up the firewall and allow it?
If the above does not, create a Security Group, assign the RDS server to that Security Group and create an Ingress rule that either only allows specific CIDRs or a blanket 0.0.0.0/0.
> And what happens if it uses too much resources? Does it shutdown by itself?
It just gets dog slow if your I/O quota is exhausted, it goes into an error state when the disk goes full. Expand your disk quota and the RDS database becomes accessible again.
> What if i wanna fine tune a config parameter? Do I ssh into it? Can i edit it in the UI?
No SSH at all, not even for manually unfucking something, for that you need the assistance of the AWS support - but in about six years I never had a database FUBAR'ing itself.
As for config parameters, there's an UI for this called "parameter/option groups", you can set almost all config parameters there, and you can use these as templates for other servers you need as well.