Project CloudBridge – Day 3: Designing & Deploying Amazon RDS PostgreSQL (OLTP Foundation)

Project CloudBridge – Day 3: Building the OLTP Foundation with Amazon RDS PostgreSQL

Series Context: After understanding why enterprises separate OLTP and Analytics (Day 1) and designing a real-time analytics architecture (Day 2), today we move into hands-on infrastructure setup.

Day 3 is where architecture thinking transforms into real implementation.

---

🎯 Day 3 Objective

Design and deploy a production-grade Amazon RDS PostgreSQL instance that will act as the OLTP source database for our real-time analytics pipeline.

This database will:

• Act as the enterprise transactional system
• Serve as the source for AWS DMS
• Feed analytics data into Amazon Redshift (later days)

---

🧱 What We Are Building Today

Today we focus on the OLTP layer of our architecture:

1. Understand RDS PostgreSQL architecture components
2. Design production-ready configuration
3. Create and configure the RDS instance
4. Validate connectivity and basic database operations

---

📐 RDS PostgreSQL Architecture Overview

Before creating the database, we must understand key architectural components:

• DB Instance vs Database
• Multi-AZ vs Single-AZ deployment
• Storage types (gp3, io1)
• Subnet Groups and VPC isolation
• Security Groups and access control
• Parameter Groups
• Backup and maintenance configuration

This is not just “Create Database”. This is infrastructure design.

---

⚙ Production Design Decisions

We will make enterprise-style configuration choices:

• Instance class selection (compute vs memory optimized)
• Storage sizing and autoscaling
• Backup retention period
• Monitoring configuration
• Encryption using AWS KMS
• Public vs Private accessibility

The goal is to think like a Cloud Architect — not just a console user.

---

🛠 Hands-On Tasks

By the end of today, we will:

• Launch Amazon RDS PostgreSQL
• Configure VPC and Subnet Group
• Attach Security Group
• Enable automated backups
• Create initial database
• Create application user
• Test connectivity using psql

---

🔍 Validation Step

After deployment, we will verify:

SELECT version();

This confirms:

• Database is operational
• Network configuration is correct
• Security rules are properly defined

---

🧠 Why Day 3 Matters

Without a properly designed OLTP source database:

• AWS DMS cannot replicate data
• Change Data Capture (CDC) will not work
• Analytics pipeline will fail

Day 3 builds the foundation for the entire CloudBridge architecture.

---

📌 End of Day 3 Expected Outcome

• One production-ready RDS PostgreSQL instance
• Verified connectivity
• Clear understanding of AWS database architecture
• Ready to configure AWS DMS on Day 4

---

Next: Day 4 – Configuring AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for Continuous Data Replication