SQL Server on Amazon RDS vs SQL Server on Amazon EC2

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server on Amazon RDS vs SQL Server on Amazon EC2

    Br. Kenneth Igiri
    https://kennethigiri.com
    All nations come to my light, all kings to the brightness of my rising

  • Br. Kenneth Igiri - Wednesday, April 11, 2018 10:01 PM

    Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server on Amazon RDS vs SQL Server on Amazon EC2

    Perfect timing,  was just thinking about this.  In EC2 can you make the compute power flexible, like can you say I need  64 cores & 256 GB RAM during peak hours and off peak 16 cores to save some cost.

  • curious_sqldba - Wednesday, April 11, 2018 11:16 PM

    Br. Kenneth Igiri - Wednesday, April 11, 2018 10:01 PM

    Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server on Amazon RDS vs SQL Server on Amazon EC2

    Perfect timing,  was just thinking about this.  In EC2 can you make the compute power flexible, like can you say I need  64 cores & 256 GB RAM during peak hours and off peak 16 cores to save some cost.

    Hello Curious. Thanks for the feedback. I am not sure about this for databases but you can do something like this with regular web servers or other server with static content used for processing workload. You can achieve this using Auto Scaling Groups. Auto Scaling Groups gives you flexibility to provide a range of instances you want to spin up (or "down") depending on thresholds you set such as CPU usage or memory usage etc. So let's say I start with 2 EC2 instances and specify a maximum of 8, the system will automatically launch new instances to support my workload when CPU exceeds 70% for example and shrink back to 2 during low peak periods.

    I have tried the above with Linux web servers running apache with their files sitting on S3. But I think there may be some quirks with servers in an AD Domain (same computer names) and of course database servers that need to keep data consistent.

    Br. Kenneth Igiri
    https://kennethigiri.com
    All nations come to my light, all kings to the brightness of my rising

  • what about performance? assuming EC2 and RDS with same cpu/ram settings, which option woud be faster?

  • mauriciorpp - Sunday, April 15, 2018 12:04 PM

    what about performance? assuming EC2 and RDS with same cpu/ram settings, which option woud be faster?

    I have not simulated this so I may not be able to give an authoritative answer. However I do not expect the different to be significant.

    Br. Kenneth Igiri
    https://kennethigiri.com
    All nations come to my light, all kings to the brightness of my rising

  • Br. Kenneth Igiri - Sunday, April 15, 2018 2:27 PM

    mauriciorpp - Sunday, April 15, 2018 12:04 PM

    what about performance? assuming EC2 and RDS with same cpu/ram settings, which option woud be faster?

    I have not simulated this so I may not be able to give an authoritative answer. However I do not expect the different to be significant.

    I would assume RDS is expected to be slightly faster, because of optimizations we count that AWS will apply at the server level. For EC2 instance, the one configuring SQL server must know what he/she is doing to make optimal use of the hardware.

    But if you can run some queries for benchmarking it just to make it clear to anyone doing research on this topic, it would be great. 🙂

  • Br. Kenneth Igiri - Wednesday, April 11, 2018 10:01 PM

    Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server on Amazon RDS vs SQL Server on Amazon EC2

    Were u ever able to successfully set up AG in EC2. I was able to get 90% of it working, i ran into issues when assigning cluster ips to nodes.

  • curious_sqldba - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 11:52 AM

    Br. Kenneth Igiri - Wednesday, April 11, 2018 10:01 PM

    Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server on Amazon RDS vs SQL Server on Amazon EC2

    Were u ever able to successfully set up AG in EC2. I was able to get 90% of it working, i ran into issues when assigning cluster ips to nodes.

    Haven't try that though. will take a look and share.

    Br. Kenneth Igiri
    https://kennethigiri.com
    All nations come to my light, all kings to the brightness of my rising

  • One deal-breaker for us was that, although AWS does have SSIS, the range of allowed SSIS functions is very limited.  You can't interact with the filesystem (yes there are functions to full files from an S3 bucket, but you're limited to 100 files currently, and only files of type .bcp, .csv, .dat, .fmt, .info, .lst, .tbl, .txt, and .xml - no ZIPs allowed), so if you're doing data warehousing with lots of incoming files and want to use SSIS to load lots of files or do any kind of data outputs/filesystem operations, you'll really need a separate server for handling that.

  • Also, you don't have access to really good features of SQL Server, like Xtended Events, so in case you need something like that you will need to go back to the old Trace.

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by  Emito.
  • What is cost difference between RDS and sql server on EC2?

    We are in development, so I thought RDS would be the cheapest way to go for now until production, but we need database email and full blown SSIS, so will probably have to go live with EC2 instance.

    Is it worth cost savings to migrate from RDS to ec2 when it is time to go live?

  • A few things that might help

    1. Remember you might still need Amazon SES when configuring Database Mail
    2. Explore Amazon's Calculator to determine what you can save https://calculator.aws/#/

    Br. Kenneth Igiri
    https://kennethigiri.com
    All nations come to my light, all kings to the brightness of my rising

  • I must add for integrity sake that I noticed recently that Azure SQL could be way cheaper than Amazon RDS actually.

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-sql/#features

    Br. Kenneth Igiri
    https://kennethigiri.com
    All nations come to my light, all kings to the brightness of my rising

  • I am not against using azure, especially since it will be a sql server backend, but it is so complicated trying to figure out their pricing and platform. I signed up for it a few months ago and they said it would be free to develop on, but they started charging me 130 per month and I am not sure why. So I just cancelled it and leaned back toward AWS for now. But AWS RDS has limitations.

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