Amazon RDS vs vCloud Air comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Virtustream are both solutions in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.3, while Virtustream is ranked #21. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 11.8% mindshare in DS, compared to Virtustream’s 1.7% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Virtustream users who would recommend it.

Amazon RDS

Read 58 Amazon RDS reviews

4,538 Views
4,266 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

vCloud Air

Read 3 vCloud Air reviews

939 Views
300 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon RDS

vCloud Air

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2024

Amazon RDS and vCloud Air are popular cloud solutions each offering unique benefits in the cloud computing market. Based on user reviews, Amazon RDS is preferred for its pricing and customer support, while vCloud Air is noted for its feature set.

Features: Amazon RDS users value its automatic backups, scalability, and customer support. vCloud Air users appreciate its integration capabilities, flexibility, and robust features for complex environments.

Room for Improvement: Users of Amazon RDS suggest enhancements in performance metrics, query processing speed, and monitoring tools. vCloud Air users point out the steep learning curve, limited documentation, and the need for better customer service resources.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon RDS is recognized for its straightforward deployment and effective customer service. vCloud Air offers a flexible deployment model but has mixed reviews regarding its customer service, with some users finding it less responsive.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon RDS users report satisfaction with the setup cost and overall ROI, making it a cost-effective solution. vCloud Air is seen as premium-priced but justifiable due to the high ROI in complex operational environments.

To learn more, read our detailed Database as a Service (DBaaS) Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

March 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon RDS

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Relational Databases Tools (9th)

vCloud Air

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

21st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (22nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 11.8%, down from 25.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vCloud Air is 1.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database as a Service (DBaaS) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon RDS	11.8%
vCloud Air	1.7%
Other	86.5%

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

Featured Reviews

Baqir Sajjad

AWS Architect at Virtual University

Customer support and automated backups offer reliability while ease of deployment enhances user experience

The features of Amazon RDS that I have found most valuable include web and mobile applications, enterprise applications, data warehousing and analytics, and software as a service platforms, along with dev testing environments, disaster recoveries, and backups. The mobile app backend and development environment is also the best feature for database management for my customers. Database management is effective in Amazon RDS because it offers automated backups, high availability, read replicas, and support from multiple database engineers, while also providing security, monitoring and metrics, scalability. We are using snapshots and database migrations as well as performance optimization. The impact of Amazon RDS scalability and backup has been positive, with good vertical scaling, scale up and down, horizontal scaling, and storage scaling. The performance was good and availability helped with reducing downtime.

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Saurabh Chandratre

Director Solutions Architect - EMEA & APAC at Blue Medora

With the VPC, you can run your workloads in an active state, use it for development work and for hosting SQL/Exchange Servers in IaaS; RaaS/DaaS for DR activities.

All three components of the vCloud Air are equally valuable and important, i.e., IaaS, DaaS and RaaS. I like the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering compared to the Dedicated Cloud. It gives me the flexibility to utilize the pay-as-you-go option. You can run your workloads in an active state at reasonable prices. I have seen lots of companies use it for their development work, as well as for hosting SQL and Exchange Servers, i.e., in the active-passive mode instead of Replication (RaaS). Disaster Recovery is also a great feature that is affordable and easy to use. Disaster Recovery is a great component of the vCloud Air, where you can protect the on-premises cloud infrastructure, by providing self-service recovery options using the vSphere Replication. Some of the features that really stand out and I have used in my projects are: * Direct Connect: It provides high speed and private line connectivity. * Offline Data Transfer: For encrypted bulk data transport.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The biggest advantage of Amazon RDS, which is basically an AWS service, is that you can customize it."

"Amazon RDS is very easy to use."

"It significantly reduces database management overhead."

"The most valuable feature is that it is a fully managed database, where they handle most of the administrative tasks and leave the users more time to concentrate on business."

"I use Amazon RDS to support scalability, with multi-AZ support being an essential aspect."

"The solution’s scalability, usability, and availability are valuable to us."

"I found it to be a stable solution."

"It handles large-scale data migrations perfectly. Amazon RDS's performance is quite good. Charges are incurred after you utilize the service"

More Amazon RDS pros

"The Cloud DRaaS solution provided the organization with new levels of flexibility and cost control, together with rapid expansion capability."

"This is the part that should be making admins and CIOs smile."

"VMware Workstation has an interesting feature to manage vSphere infrastructure (and also stand-alone ESXi hosts) that is really powerful and useful, for example to avoid to install the vSphere client (or the integration plugin) just to open one VM console or to change the power status for some VM."

Cons

"There are some use cases that might come up where we would want to understand the performance aspects better."

"I like using Amazon RDS because it offers quick operations for me. However, there are times when understanding how to use some of the services can be challenging, even with documentation. If I could add a feature, I'd improve navigation for related services."

"Some features are disabled, like running "alter system/database". There are Amazon alternatives, but it is not transparent to the application."

"One of the challenges of AWS RDS is that it doesn't support performance insight, so we need to write our own script or use third-party tools."

"Amazon cannot guarantee the stability of some extensions, and there is a need for different extensions to meet PCI requirements."

"The Amazon RDS engine could provide features for additional databases, such as Db2."

"The performance is not always as good as MySQL running on its own EC2 instance."

"I feel Amazon RDS should have a lot of functionalities to make monitoring within the database easier."

More Amazon RDS cons

"It’s a really good idea, but the current implementation is very limited: you can simply see your VMs and just open the VM console."

"I don’t think it is quite where EC2 is with regard to capabilities and features but VMware is investing a lot in vCloud Air."

"I feel the user interface/portal can be improved further. I did experience timeout issues and the UI was performing slowly at times."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The cost is manageable because you can see the expense associated with each instance and utilize tools for tagging and cost control."

"The product is expensive."

"Amazon RDS is not a very expensive solution."

"The solution’s pricing could be cheaper."

"The cost of using this solution is similar to that of having your own data center."

"Licensing fees are paid on an annual basis."

"The cost depends on the kind of instance we use."

More Amazon RDS pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

University

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	22
Midsize Enterprise	16
Large Enterprise	22

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon RDS?

The pricing for Amazon RDS is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon RDS?

Currently, I cannot think of any major improvements. Perhaps more platforms in terms of database engine versions would be beneficial. Right now, Amazon RDS supports MySQL and PostgreSQL, but there ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon RDS?

I am a Solutions Architect, so I design solutions for our clients. Prior to this role, I was an implementation engineer, so I also implement solutions for our customers.

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Comparisons

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Compared 15% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Amazon RDS

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs Amazon RDS

Compared 11% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Amazon RDS

Compared 8% of the time

Yugabyte Cloud vs Amazon RDS

Compared 7% of the time

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Microsoft Azure vs vCloud Air

Compared 25% of the time

Amazon AWS vs vCloud Air

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs vCloud Air

Compared 11% of the time

Cleura vs vCloud Air

Compared 10% of the time

Alibaba Cloud vs vCloud Air

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS

April 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

March 2026

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Also Known As

RDS

No data available

Overview

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizeable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

vCloud Air is a public cloud platform built on the trusted foundation of vSphere, compatible with your on-premises data center, that includes infrastructure, disaster recovery, and various applications as service offerings. vCloud Air allows you to extend your workloads into the cloud with ease. You can migrate existing onsite virtual machines (VMs) to the public cloud or start up new application VMs directly in the cloud.

Virtustream

Sample Customers

Edmodo

Lumeta, LifeSite, Clear Tec Solutions, National Physician Services, Queens University of Charlotte, California Natural Resources Agency, Pacific Disaster Center, Seventy Seven Energy Inc., Columbia Sportswear , CSS Corp

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

March 2026

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