@[TOC]

1. Background

As a programmer, I have to deal with cloud products in my daily work.

Alibaba Cloud's shadowless cloud desktop, Servless function computing, Internet of Things platform, and ECS have been evaluated successively before.

Since our company has always used the self built MySQL on ECS and has never tried the cloud computing version of MySQL, we will try it today to make some technical reserves for future work.

2. Concept

Just like the difference between ECS and local server, cloud database is the database of cloud computing version.

There are many Alibaba Cloud databases. Today, we try RDS MySQL Serverless, which can pay on demand and dynamically match resources. In this way, it is more cost-effective if we use it in the short term.

For example, it is convenient to buy the product temporarily to improve the performance dynamically if the database access has soared due to activities in a certain period of time.

3. Operation steps

3.1 Purchase of products

You need to purchase before use. After selecting RDS products, configure parameters as needed. The following screenshot is a screenshot of the trial version for reference. At present, free trial is also available. If you are not sure whether it will work well, you can try it first: Trial address

Select duration:

Select the basic configuration and purchase according to the demand. The higher the configuration, the more expensive the price.

Select the network configuration, which is OK by default, and then confirm the trial (purchase).

3.2 Configuring RDS Accounts

Although you have purchased an RDS database instance, you need to configure the account information to use it.

At this point, log in to the AliCloud console and navigate to the RDS menu. Note that there are many Alibaba Cloud products. You can click the Database category on the right to quickly locate them.

Then click the [Manage] button in the [Instance List] menu:

Then click the [Create Account] button in the [Account Management] menu:

Finally, enter information to confirm:

3.3 Setting network access rights

To protect security, RDS instances are not allowed to access the Internet by default. If we want to use external access, first open an external access address for RDS.

Click [Open Internet Address] in the [Database Connection] menu.

As shown in the figure below, add [0.0.0.0/0] to the white list as prompted, which means that all IP addresses can access RDS instances.

At this time, you can see the Internet address and Internet port information.

3.4 Connection examples

This step is very simple. We can use the client tool to connect the instance, such as Navicat, fill in the host address, port, account, and password, and then click Test Connection.

4. Advantages compared with self built database

4.1 Elastic setting

The performance of the self built database depends on the server. RDS can be set elastically to flexibly respond to traffic peaks. As shown in the figure below, click Adjust Elastic Settings to flexibly set the calculated force.

4.2 Monitoring is relatively intuitive

Just look at the picture:

4.3 Alarm is flexible

As shown in the following figure, after clicking Alarm Rule Settings, you can customize the rules, which is very flexible.

4.4 Backup is more secure and convenient

Since it is a cloud database, backup has greater advantages.

First, you can directly back up to the cloud, which is much more secure than local. In addition, it is more convenient to directly configure the backup strategy, without having to purchase a backup cloud service or write your own backup program.

5. Summary

In conclusion, cloud databases have greater advantages over self built databases in terms of security, convenience, elastic expansion, etc.

The disadvantage is that it may cost a little money, so whether to use it or not should be decided according to the actual situation and the cost performance ratio.