Choose between Amazon RDS and AWS EC2.

The choice between a database on an EC2 instance and RDS is essentially the choice between an unmanaged environment where the burden is on you to manage everything yourself and a managed service where the cloud vendor shoulders the burden of mundane management tasks. A simple API call gives you control over deployment, backups, snapshots, restores, sizing, high availability, and replicas. In contrast, the self-managed database on the EC2 option requires you to manually set up, configure, manage, and tune the various components, including Amazon EC2 instances, storage volumes, scalability, networking, and security.