Sharding, also known as horizontal partitioning, is a popular scale-out approach for relational databases. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed relational database service that provides great features to make sharding easy to use in the cloud. In this post, I describe how to use Amazon RDS to implement a sharded database architecture to achieve high scalability, high availability, and fault tolerance for data storage. I discuss considerations for schema design and monitoring metrics when deploying Amazon RDS as a database shard. I also outline the challenges for resharding and highlight the push-button scale-up and scale-out solutions in Amazon RDS.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights, an advanced database performance monitoring feature that makes it easy to diagnose and solve performance challenges on Amazon RDS databases, is now generally available on Amazon RDS for SQL Server. It offers a free tier with 7 days of data retention and a paid long-term data retention option.