RDS is deployed within a VPC and uses VPC networking for isolation and security. The database is placed in subnets defined by a DB Subnet Group, while Security Groups control which resources can connect. Applications running on EC2, Lambda, or ECS access the RDS endpoint through private IP connectivity within the VPC. For high availability, RDS can span multiple Availability Zones using a Multi-AZ deployment, where a standby database is maintained in another subnet and AZ.