July 11, 2012 at 6:19 am
Microsoft recently announced the ability to have a full SQL Server on an Azure virtual machine:
https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/windows/common-tasks/install-sql-server/
This can be a good candidate as well.
July 11, 2012 at 6:22 am
matanyungman 88189 (7/11/2012)
Microsoft recently announced the ability to have a full SQL Server on an Azure virtual machine:https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/windows/common-tasks/install-sql-server/
This can be a good candidate as well.
For some applications that will be very useful. In this case having a managed database is a real win for the client as they don't have the staff to manage it.
July 11, 2012 at 7:04 am
AWS SQL Server RDS Snapshots are an EBS volume snapshot of either the data and log files or a backup, I've never figured out which. You can restore this to the same version of SQL Server (or higher) and to any instance size.
Jeremiah Peschka
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Managing Director - Brent Ozar PLF, LLC
July 11, 2012 at 7:18 am
Thank you, yes I am about to do some benchmarking for a client comparing the performance of both Azure and AWS. I intend to run a few different VM sizes for both and with AWS I will be able to try different sizes of database server. We’re hoping we’ll get permission to share the results back via a follow-up article.
I did a great deal of benchmarking of both AWS[/url] and with RDS. Effectively, though, you'll see pretty limited IO performance (compared to on-premise) and the biggest bottleneck
Definitely being able to connect into RDS via SSMS from anywhere will be a big selling point for many people. It’s a matter of getting the best compromise between convenience and security.
Security can be strictly controlled using IP restrictions in a DB Security Group as well as limiting access to different portions of the console and API using IAM security (think of it as something like AD for the Amazon cloud). I have a few RDS and regular SQL Server instances hanging out in Amazon right now that I can only connect to from home thanks to firewall rules. AWS provides an incredible amount of functionality, but sometimes you have to combine three or four product features to get it. It's really important to remember that RDS is not a magical service - it's just SQL Server running on an EC2 instance with AWS managing the backups for you.
SQL Server RDS not being available in a VPC yet (as of 2012-07-11) is the biggest hindrance that I see.
Jeremiah Peschka
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Managing Director - Brent Ozar PLF, LLC
July 11, 2012 at 7:59 am
Hey Peter really enjoyed the article, nice job.
Hey Jeremiah Thanks for some additional reading, looking forward to diving into it!
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July 12, 2012 at 7:32 am
SQL Database running on Windows Azure (current version) supports the following management systems:
o Windows Azure SQL Database Management Portal
o SQL Server Management Studio (supported versions include 2008R2 and 20012)
Source: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/sql-databases/how-to-manage-a-sqldb/
July 12, 2012 at 8:40 am
Maybe I'm just not understanding this whole "cloud" thing, but what's so special about using AWS or Azure instead of a regular web host using one or more VMs/VDSs, etc., and just installing a full version of SQL Server on that? You can then use whatever you want to communicate with and manage it, without restrictions.
July 12, 2012 at 8:47 am
Matthew Lehn (7/12/2012)
Maybe I'm just not understanding this whole "cloud" thing, but what's so special about using AWS or Azure instead of a regular web host using one or more VMs/VDSs, etc., and just installing a full version of SQL Server on that? You can then use whatever you want to communicate with and manage it, without restrictions.
If you are talking about AWS or Azure's new IaaS cloud model then there is really not any difference than a regular web provider giving you a VM. In both cases you need to manage the VM, OS patches and SQL patches and updates. Of course AWS and Azure cloud IaaS is probably much more robust for availability, configuration and performance than most standard web providers.
SQL Azure is different. There is no OS to maintain and you also do not need to manage the SQL instance either. All you ever need to care about is your DB and data. Think of it as an instance of the SQL relational engine in the cloud that you just create DB's on. That is the real value add. Of course that comes at a price of less functionality as if you had your own VM and SQL instance.
July 12, 2012 at 10:19 am
Matthew Lehn (7/12/2012)
Maybe I'm just not understanding this whole "cloud" thing, but what's so special about using AWS or Azure instead of a regular web host using one or more VMs/VDSs, etc., and just installing a full version of SQL Server on that? You can then use whatever you want to communicate with and manage it, without restrictions.
AWS or Azure's database offerings, on their own, aren't terribly exciting. The interesting art comes in when you can examine your infrastructure and application and automate decisions around scalability.
Take a multi-tenant application, for example. After some tuning and metrics gathering you determine that you can support 27 clients on an m1.xlarge AWS SQL Server RDS instance. At this point you can make a decision to spin up another m1.xlarge programmatically or even provision it on the fly as a customer signs up. Or you could look at usage metrics and determine that you need an m2.4xlarge during the hours of 7AM and 7PM EST but during the rest of the day you can get by on an m1.medium. All of this can be monitored, analyzed, and eventually acted upon allowing your infrastructure to respond on demand to your business.
Admittedly, this infrastructure automation is a bigger deal for application and web servers than it is for database servers. Databases tend to be fairly static in their size requirements. AWS and Azure do give you the flexibility to scale up as your business scales without waiting for someone to provision a new server for you and move your drives. AWS lets you scale your compute ability differently than you scale storage. IIRC with Windows Azure SQL Database you're scaling both CPU and storage together. (I tried to check this in my Azure portal but I found the interface so aggravating that I gave up.)
Jeremiah Peschka
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Managing Director - Brent Ozar PLF, LLC
July 12, 2012 at 11:35 am
Ah, so essentially you pay less or more as you need to scale up or down, as the requirements (may) change throughout the day (or during a seasonal sale, for instance), whereas in a traditional VM, everything is pretty much static. Overall, the pricing appears to be much more in AWS/Azure than a traditional hosting environment. I guess you're paying for the convenience (and scalability).
Anyways, didn't mean to make this thread go off topic. Was just curious to see if people were going to the cloud just because "everybody's doing it" and it's the "latest and greatest thing". Good to know some of the possible reasons that companies make the change.
July 12, 2012 at 12:12 pm
Matthew Lehn (7/12/2012)
Ah, so essentially you pay less or more as you need to scale up or down, as the requirements (may) change throughout the day (or during a seasonal sale, for instance), whereas in a traditional VM, everything is pretty much static. Overall, the pricing appears to be much more in AWS/Azure than a traditional hosting environment. I guess you're paying for the convenience (and scalability).Anyways, didn't mean to make this thread go off topic. Was just curious to see if people were going to the cloud just because "everybody's doing it" and it's the "latest and greatest thing". Good to know some of the possible reasons that companies make the change.
Our clients here are getting a managed database service and high avilablilty at a resonable price.
Also they get to out cloud somewhere on their marketing material :-).
July 13, 2012 at 3:01 am
Jeremiah Peschka (7/11/2012)
Thank you, yes I am about to do some benchmarking for a client comparing the performance of both Azure and AWS. I intend to run a few different VM sizes for both and with AWS I will be able to try different sizes of database server. We’re hoping we’ll get permission to share the results back via a follow-up article.
I did a great deal of benchmarking of both AWS[/url] and with RDS. Effectively, though, you'll see pretty limited IO performance (compared to on-premise) and the biggest bottleneck
Definitely being able to connect into RDS via SSMS from anywhere will be a big selling point for many people. It’s a matter of getting the best compromise between convenience and security.
Security can be strictly controlled using IP restrictions in a DB Security Group as well as limiting access to different portions of the console and API using IAM security (think of it as something like AD for the Amazon cloud). I have a few RDS and regular SQL Server instances hanging out in Amazon right now that I can only connect to from home thanks to firewall rules. AWS provides an incredible amount of functionality, but sometimes you have to combine three or four product features to get it. It's really important to remember that RDS is not a magical service - it's just SQL Server running on an EC2 instance with AWS managing the backups for you.
SQL Server RDS not being available in a VPC yet (as of 2012-07-11) is the biggest hindrance that I see.
I saw that article of yours, very good. The testing will be doing is to see, for a particular client's application, what level of Amazon EC2 and RDS is needed to out perform Azure. At that point I'll check out the relative costs and make some recommendations.
Yes the Amazon controls are far better than those in Azure, it is just a shame they don't also do encrypted connections.
July 13, 2012 at 3:08 am
So quickly information is out of date. We now have some dmv's for Azure.
July 13, 2012 at 7:21 am
irozenberg (7/10/2012)
G'day. Why you did not even consider an option to move from SQL Azure to WinServer/SQL VM in cloud as part of Microsoft Azure IaaS recent offer (announced in beginning of June).
^^This. This article is essentially apples to oranges comparison as one is IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and other is SaaS (Software as a service). June release of Azure introduced VM hosting which is IaaS. You CAN compare that to Amazon's offering. Azure's SQL Database offering, while yes, limited compared to on-prem version right now, will change dramatically over the course of next few releases. The Azure offerings will eventually be parity (or close to) on-prem. In the end, just do what works for you.
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July 13, 2012 at 7:24 am
Peter Marriott (7/13/2012)
Yes the Amazon controls are far better than those in Azure, it is just a shame they don't also do encrypted connections.
Where do you need to connect from? There's an encrypted VPN tunnel that you can use.
Jeremiah Peschka
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Managing Director - Brent Ozar PLF, LLC
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