I'll stick with Aurora and choose the MySQL compatible edition. Then for the engine version, we will see a list of all versions with the MySQL version they support. I'm going to select the latest Aurora version that supports MySQL 8. For the templates, we can choose between production and dev. This will define some default AWS parameters that AWS will use when creating your database. I'll stick with production. Now let's set the name for our database. I'll use Laracasts. And for the master database user, I will leave the default admin user and then choose to let AWS auto-generate the password for me. Then for the instance configuration, we can choose between serverless in which AWS will automatically create, delete, and scale capacity up or down,

One endpoint for the writer instance and another for reader instances. AWS will load balance our connections to multiple reader instances if we have multiple ones. All we need to do is connect to the reader through this endpoint and AWS will handle the routing. So for example, in a Laravel application, we put the writer endpoint in the writer connection configuration and the reader endpoint in the reader connection configuration. AWS will connect the Laravel application to the appropriate instance based on the endpoint used, the state of each instance, whether it is functioning or failing, and the load. We managed to have all this configured for us behind the scenes. Without RDS, we would have had to configure all this ourselves. This is an example of why you may want to use a managed service like RDS rather than hosting your databases inside a regular EC2 instance. Now let's go connect to our database.