Here are a couple gotchas I've seen on RDS: - If you are running a MultiAZ instance, it is supposed to fail over automatically, but if the problem is in the ne

Here are a couple gotchas I've seen on RDS: - If you are running a MultiAZ instance, it is supposed to fail over automatically, but if the problem is in the networking, then you can still effectively lose service. One way around that is to run a read replica in another AZ, and use a Route53 entry with a health check to send traffic to the read replica if the primary isn't reachable. You'll still need to promote the read replica to a master though. - If you restore from a snapshot, the new EBS volume only pulls blocks of data from S3 as they are requested. So these reads are a lot slower than normal. If you have a large database you could have degraded performance for days. Here is some more info about this: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-restoring-volume.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-resto...