There are a ton of amazing things that you can do besides the steps that we have covered in this chapter. To begin with, try out encrypting your databases using the Encryption facility provided by RDS itself. RDS encrypts as well as decrypts data without any major impact on your DB instance's performance. The encryption process can only be set up during the DB instance's initial deployment phase, so plan and use the facility before you actually deploy your database. An important point to remember here, though, is that encryption is not supported on the t1.micro instance class. You will have to use the memory optimized (R3) or burst capable (T2) for the same. To know more about how you can use and set up the encryption on your DB instances, refer to http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Overview.Encryption.html.

Besides RDS, AWS also provides a host of other database-related services that you can try out depending on your application's needs. For example, if you are looking for a high performance and low cost non-relational database, then Amazon DynamoDB is your obvious choice! With DynamoDB you can actually set up and start using a NoSQL database in a matter of minutes! Plus, you don't have to worry about any of the management overheads such as clustering or scaling. RDS automatically replicates and synchronizes your data across multiple AZs present in a region, thereby providing high availability and durability.

AWS also provides a highly scalable caching service in the form of Amazon ElastiCache. You can use this service as an in-memory caching service for your web applications and improve their overall performance by retrieving information much faster than a disk-based database. Along with this, AWS also provides a petabyte scalable data warehousing service called as RedShift that you can use to query extremely large datasets. It's easy to set up and the best part is that it scales as per your needs! The more data you feed it, the larger it grows, and all this without any upfront costs or commitments! To know more about these services and how to use them, refer to https://aws.amazon.com/running_databases.