When using Amazon RDS, which responsibility remains with the customer?

AWS manages the underlying infrastructure, including hardware, networking cables, and the operating system for Amazon RDS. Customers are responsible for tasks like creating IAM policies to manage access to their RDS instances, configuring database settings, and managing data backups and restoration. The shared responsibility model dictates that AWS handles the "security of the cloud" (physical infrastructure, global network, compute, storage, database, networking), while customers are responsible for "security in the cloud" (customer data, platform applications, identity and access management, operating systems, network and firewall configurations, client-side data encryption). Therefore, creating IAM policies falls under the customer's responsibility.