Read the original article at RDS or MySQL – Ten Use Cases

Amazon’s Relational Database Service is based on MySQL under the hood.  So many colleagues and clients ask me – should I go with RDS or MySQL? As with every technology question, the answer is – it depends.

Here are some scenarios to help you decide.

1. I’m replicating into Amazon from a physical datacenter

A: This setup is common if you’re using Amazon’s VPC or Virtual Private Cloud.  With a router dropped into your datacenter, VPC allows you to extend and spinup virtual instances from Amazon as if they’re sitting in your own existing datacenter.  Great stuff, but you won’t be able to replicate from your existing master MySQL instance to cloud Amazon RDS instances.  To do that, roll your own with MySQL 5.5 or Percona …