Having a persistent storage service is a key component of effectively using the AWS cloud for your systems. By ensuring that you have a highly available, fault-tolerant location to store your application state in, you can stop depending on individual servers for your data. AWS provides several different database choices, so you have plenty of flexibility to pick the database that best matches your use case. 

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Creating an RDS database with automatic failover
• Creating an RDS database read replica
• Promoting an RDS read replica to master
• Creating a one-time RDS database backup
• Restoring an RDS database from a snapshot
• Migrating an RDS database
• Managing Amazon Aurora databases
• Create a DynamoDB table with a Global Secondary Index
• Calculating Amazon DynamoDB capacity
• Managing Amazon Neptune graph databases

By understanding the characteristics of the various database technologies offered on AWS, you will be equipped to design and administer architectures that meet any data storage need.