Relational Database Design for High Availability and Scalability on AWS

Modern cloud applications demand databases that never go down and can scale instantly to meet user demand. Designing these systems requires a solid understanding of cloud-native relational database architectures, replication strategies, and connection management. This course guides you from foundational database concepts to advanced deployment patterns on AWS. You will start by mastering core relational database principles, high availability terminology, and basic cloud infrastructure concepts before moving on to practical architectural designs. Through clear, written explanations and structured configuration examples, you will learn how to eliminate single points of failure, set up multi-Region replication, and optimize your database connections for maximum performance. What you'll learn: - Understand the core principles of high availability, replication lag, and disaster recovery metrics like RTO and RPO - Configure RDS Multi-AZ deployments and read replicas to ensure continuous uptime and read scalability - Implement Aurora auto-scaling policies, serverless configurations, and global database clusters for multi-Region resilience - Optimize database connection limits using modern connection pooling techniques and RDS Proxy - Apply security best practices, including encryption at rest, in transit, and secure credential rotation - Monitor database health and performance metrics using CloudWatch and Enhanced Monitoring This written course is structured to build your confidence step-by-step, starting with essential database definitions and progressing to real-world scalability patterns. You will read detailed architectural breakdowns and analyze practical configuration scenarios that you can immediately apply to your own cloud infrastructure. This course is designed for beginner cloud engineers, database administrators, and developers who have a basic familiarity with database concepts and want to learn how to design scalable, highly available systems on AWS. No advanced cloud architecture experience is required. Start reading today to build resilient, production-ready databases on AWS.