Let's perform the following steps to deploy an RDS instance:

1. To deploy an RDS instance, we navigate to the Amazon RDS console and click on Create database:

2. We need to select an engine to deploy. The recommended option for Amazon Aurora will be selected but you can select any of the other engines. In this example, we will choose a MySQL instance and then click Next:

3. When choosing a MySQL instance, Amazon Aurora will be recommended for production as the engine is superior to the MySQL engine in all respects. We will choose the Dev/Test - MySQL option for our purposes:

4. In Step 3, we need to specify the setup for the database. We can choose the license model and DB engine version, and the instance class, which determines the size of the instance serving our database (in our example, we are selecting db.t2.small). We also have the chance to select the option to create a Multi-AZ deployment to make the database highly available:

5. Next, we select the storage type and size, and enter the name for the database instance, and the username and password for the database administrator. After we have completed Step 3, we click Next:

6. In the advanced settings, under Network & Security, we can select the VPC in which we want to deploy, whether we want the instance to be public, and the availability zone in which to deploy, as well as the security group that will allow access to the database server from our instances:

7. The Database Options section will let us create a default database, set the port, select the database parameters and options that allow us to tune our RDS databases, and enable or disable database user authentication via IAM:

8. In the next section, we can also enable encryption, configure automatic backups, enable detailed monitoring, and enable the publishing of logs to CloudWatch:

9. Under Maintenance, we can select whether we want to allow minor upgrades to the DB engine and select a maintenance window if required. For production databases, deletion protection is also available. After completing this part, we click on Create database:

10. We will get a notification once a database is created. On this page, we can click on View DB instance details:

11. In the instance details, we can see the performance metrics for our database:

12. To connect to the database, find the endpoint DNS name and port that the database is available on:

As you can see, it takes much less effort to create a database instance than it would if we were deploying it on an EC2 instance. Two more benefits are that it is very easy to configure and deploy a database through the same process, and that we are provided with a DNS name that we can easily connect to and use in our application.