In AWS RDS, what is the difference between "managed" and "fully managed" services?

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If I want to set up a PostgreSQL-compatible database on AWS, I have 3 choices:

  • Manual: EC2 (spin up an EC2 and manually set up and maintain a PostgreSQL database on the EC2).
  • Managed: RDS-PostgreSQL (AWS will set up and maintain the database instances).
  • Fully managed: RDS Aurora in PostgreSQL-compatible mode (AWS will set up and maintain the database instances, just like with RDS-PostgreSQL?)

My question concerns the difference between "managed" and "fully managed". Many AWS certification training materials highlight the "fully managed" feature as an advantage that RDS Aurora in PostgreSQL-compatible mode has over RDS-PostgreSQL. I don't understand what the distinction is.

AWS documentation lists these items as the advantage of the "managed" feature of RDS Postgres: "hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups". To compare, these are the items that AWS documentation lists as the advantage of the "fully managed" feature of RDS Aurora: "hardware provisioning, software patching, setup, configuration, or backups". As far as I can tell, the only difference between these lists is "configuration". What am I missing?

Note that I am not asking about other differences between RDS Aurora and RDS Postgres. I'm specifically asking about the difference between "managed" and "fully managed".

amazon-aurora amazon-rds amazon-web-services
1 Answers

Your concern is to understand fully managed and managed services.

Let me explain fully managed service with an example of DynamoDB, which is a fully managed service. AWS manages all infrastructure, and software updates, and at the end all you need to do is use the service and maybe set up some IAM permissions to access it.

While in case of managed services it works on the shared responsibility, in short you have more control on it, AWS do not manage at Infra level like security patching, updates, scaling etc.

Now the above explanation of managed and fully managed services can be linked with multiple AWS services.

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