For most of production RDS databases , we normally have a related EC2 server to access that RDS database through tools like datapump, sqlplus etc.



RDS is great for point and click but if you want to run your own monitoring or other administration related scripts, you need to have an EC2 instance with AWS CLI installed. For example if you want to check the status of RDS instances or if you want to check if RDS snapshots happened or not today through some check and notify DBA through page or email, you can do that with the AWS CLI.

I will be writing and sharing some RDS related shell scripts using AWS CLI in coming days so stay tuned.