© 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
Amazon RDS for SQL Server Cost Optimizations
and Migration Best Practices
Mesgana Gormley
Senior Database Specialist SA
© 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
Agenda
• Background
• SQL Server options on AWS
• Business value of Amazon RDS for SQL Server
• Migration best practices and cost optimization
• Migration framework
• Rightsizing and consolidation
• Cost optimization
• Case study
• Summary
© 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
Meet Your Presenter
Mesgana Gormley
• 10+ years of experience in Database Administration and Advising roles
• Experience working with a number of companies – Public and Private sectors
• Joined AWS one year ago
• Based out of Virginia
© 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
Background
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Choose the right migration strategy
• Amazon Aurora – SQL/OLTP
• Amazon Redshift – SQL/OLAP
• Amazon DynamoDB – Key-value
• Amazon Neptune – Graph
• Amazon DocumentDB – Document
• Amazon Timestream – Time-series
• Amazon Keyspaces – Wide-column
• Amazon QLDB – Ledger
• Eliminate SQL Server licensing costs
Refactor:Adopt cloud native services
• Optimized architecture
• Automated patching
• Automated backups
• Proven high availability
Re-platform:SQL Server on Amazon RDS
• Familiar admin experience
• Full control over the
environment
• All SQL Server features
available
• All SQL Server versions
supported
Re-host:SQL Server on EC2
Amazon RDSAmazon EC2
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Amazon RDS for SQL Server SQL Server on Amazon EC2
Customer managedAWS managed
Power, HVAC, net
OS Install/Maintenance
OS Patching
DBMS Install/Maintenance
DBMS Patching
Database Backups
High Availability
Scaling
Power, HVAC, net
OS Install/Maintenance
OS Patching
DBMS Install/Maintenance
DBMS Patching
Database Backups
High Availability
Scaling
Your Responsibility:
• App optimization and
tuning
• Deployment
orchestration
Your Responsibility:
• App optimization and
tuning
• deployment
orchestration
• Monitoring and
recovery
• High Availability
• Backups
• DB & OS patching
Value of RDS for SQL Server
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© 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
SQL Server features at a glance
Amazon RDS for SQL Server SQL Server on Amazon EC2
Versions supported: 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019 All
Editions supported: Express, Web, Standard, Enterprise All
High Availability: AWS managed Self-managed; AlwaysOn, Mirror, Log Ship
Encryption: TDE, Column-level, Always Encrypted, TLS, EBS encryption
Authentication: Windows & SQL authentication
Backups: AWS managed automated backupsSelf-managed; maintenance plans & 3rd party
tools
Maintenance: Automatic software patching Self-managed
BI Stack SSIS, SSRS, SSAS (tabular) All
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Migration best practices and cost
optimization
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Migration approach
Right-size,
consolidate &
map SQL Server
workload to
Amazon RDS
Develop
migration
business case and
apply relevant
credits
Execute
assessment tools
(Optimization
and License
Assessment –
OLA)
Understand
requirements
and discuss
how RDS for
SQL Server can
address needs
Discovery Assessment Optimization Business case Review
Review proposed
model with
customer
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Optimization & Licensing Assessment (OLA)Optimize Licensing Assets when Migrating to Cloud
Know the Baseline• What do I have deployed?
• How much is being fully utilized?
Gather Data• Monitor utilization & collect data
from on-premises & 3rd party
cloud providers
• We provide access to world class
data collection and analytics tools
Build a Plan• Which workload do I move first?
• Do we have the skill set to execute
the plan?
Understand Costs• We’re mid-term in our Microsoft
contract and can’t move
• We’ve already invested our
budget in Microsoft licenses
Accelerate Migrations• Identify application dependencies
• Prioritize migrations based on
results
• Qualify & secure AWS migration
funding
Create TCO• Infrastructure Optimization:
Recommendations built on actual
utilization – “right size”
• Licensing Optimization: based on
go forward infrastructure
• Average potential licensing cost
reductions ~ 30-40%
Cu
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Discovery Process: Working Backwards from the Customer
An AWS cloud migration assessment can help determine the following:
• Learn which data and applications are prime for migrating to the cloud
• Identify underutilized servers that can be consolidated or moved to a low-cost
alternative to the cloud
• Identify overutilized servers that are stressing the demands of the on-premises
environment
• Optimize dated hardware requiring significant licensing costs with newer hardware
or a cloud instance/host
• Database consolidation and CPU optimization
• Licensing optimization and future Enterprise Agreement (EA) planning
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Why consider migrating to RDS for SQL Server?
• Upgrade from legacy SQL Server software versions
• Opportunity to downgrade from Enterprise to Standard
• Size and overall capacity growth of databases
• IOPS requirement and increased throughput of the databases
• Target state architecture, auditing, and compliance needs
• Ability to meet a higher isolation and security compliances
• Need for simple HA/DR solution based on application criticality
• RTO, RPO, and SLA requirement for existing database workloads
• Simplifying operational overhead
• Easier to integrate with other cloud-native service for real-time performance
monitoring (removes dependency on 3rd party services)
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Consolidation considerations
• Select optimal Amazon RDS instance type based on:• vCPUs
• Memory
• Storage
• Version
• Critical cost drivers:• Enterprise vs. Standard
• SAZ vs. MAZ
• Optimal Storage choices for GP2 vs. PIOPS
• TempDB considerations
• High Availability and Disaster Recovery requirements
• Cross-region Automated Backups & PiTR
• Offload read workload through Read Replicas
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Mapping to optimal Amazon RDS instances based on
vCPU/Memory
vCPU MemoryRDS for SQL Server
Instance Type
2 4 db.t3.small
2 8 db.m5.large
2 15.25 db.r4.large
2 16 db.r5.large
vCPU MemoryRDS for SQL Server
Instance Type
8 32 db.m5d.2xlarge
8 61 db.r4.2xlarge
8 64 db.r5.2xlarge
8 244 db.x1e.2xlarge
vCPU MemoryRDS for SQL Server
Instance Type
16 64 db.m4.4xlarge
16 122 db.r4.4xlarge
16 128 db.r5d.4xlarge
16 488 db.x1e.4xlarge
vCPU MemoryRDS for SQL Server
Instance Type
32 128 db.m5.8xlarge
32 244 db.r4.8xlarge
32 256 db.r5.x8xlarge
32 976 db.x1e.8xlarge
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GP2
• Cost-effective storage
• Wide range of workloads
• Single-digit ms latencies
• Ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS for
extended periods of time
• Min of 100 IOPS (at 33.33 GiB and
below)
• Max of 16,000 IOPS (at 5,334 GiB and
above)
• Baseline performance scales linearly at
3 IOPS per GiB of volume size
• Provisioned performance 99% of the
time
• Size from 1 GiB to 16 TiB
General Purpose (GP2) vs. Provisioned IOPS
Provisioned IOPS
• I/O-intensive workloads
• Allows you to specify a consistent IOPS
rate
• Delivers provisioned performance 99.9
percent of the time
• Size ranges from 4 GiB to 16 TiB
• IOPS range from 100 IOPS to 64,000
IOPS (Nitro instances)
• Up to 32,000 (prior to Nitro instances)
• The maximum ratio of provisioned IOPS
to requested volume size (in GiB) is 50:1.
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Performance planning
• SQL Server workloads typically benefit from large amounts of
memory (caching)
• Consider db.R5, db.X1, or db.X1E - Memory Optimized instances
• Edition and licensing may impact DB instance class options
• DB instances can be modified to change the DB instance class
• Requires a reboot (or failover in Multi-AZ)
• Can scale compute capacity with the workload, if practical
• DB instance can also be modified to change storage
• Can modify size, type, and PIOPs
• Size modifications available within minutes
• Storage performance degraded during optimization
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Consolidation Scenario
Tech Stack VM Name
Allocated Utilized
Storage-TB vCPU RAM GB Storage-TB vCPU RAM GB
SQL Server SQL Instance 1 0.02 2 4 0.02 2 2.4
SQL Server SQL Instance 2 0.03 4 32 0.02 3 19.2
SQL Server SQL Instance 3 0.03 4 32 0.02 3 19.2
SQL Server SQL Instance 4 0.03 4 16 0.02 3 9.6
SQL Server SQL Instance 5 0.05 4 16 0.03 3 9.6
SQL Server SQL Instance 6 0.05 4 16 0.04 3 9.6
SQL Server SQL Instance 7 0.09 2 8 0.06 2 4.8
SQL Server SQL Instance 8 0.13 8 24 0.09 5 14.4
SQL Server SQL Instance 9 0.46 4 16 0.32 3 9.6
SQL Server SQL Instance 10 0.49 4 16 0.34 3 9.6
SQL Server SQL Instance 11 0.89 4 16 0.62 3 9.6
SQL Server SQL Instance 12 0.89 4 16 0.62 3 9.6
SQL Server SQL Instance 13 1.58 2 16 1.11 2 9.6
SQL Server SQL Instance 14 1.94 4 8 1.36 3 4.8
SQL Server SQL Instance 15 1.98 8 36 1.39 5 21.6
Target RDS Specs
vCPU RAM Storage-TB Instance Type
16 64 3 db.m5.4xlarge
16 64 4 db.m5.4xlarge
16 64 3 db.m5.4xlarge
16 64 2 db.m5.4xlarge
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AWS migration tooling
AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) easily and
securely migrates and / or replicates your databases and
data warehouses to AWS
AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT) converts your
commercial database and data warehouse schemas to open
source engines or AWS-native services, such as Amazon
Aurora and Amazon Redshift
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Database Migration Assessment
• Connect AWS SCT to
source and target
databases
• Run assessment report
• Read executive
summary
• Follow detailed
instructions
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Challenge:
With the explosion of Mathnasium franchises, the internal management tools required a scalable, fault-tolerant and highly secure solution.
Solution:
Migrated hundreds of millions of records from SQL Server to Amazon RDS which enabled the ability to adjust the instance size to the optimal level.
Result:
“Having automated backups, database snapshots, multiple availability zones and the ease of being able to change class sizes has made Mathnasium far more efficient than with SQL Server.”
—Jason Condello, VP of Technology, Mathnasium
Mathnasium
Amazon
RDS
© 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
Summary
• Opportunity to adopt RDS for SQL Server and reduce undifferentiated heavy lifting
• Reduce risk of migration by following best practices
• Mitigate costs of migration through rightsizing, consolidation, and financial incentives
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Thank you!