In this session, dive deep into best practices and considerations for running Microsoft SQL Server on AWS. Learn how to choose between Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, and understand how to optimize the performance of your SQL Server deployment for different application types. We review in detail how to provision and monitor your SQL Server databases and how to manage scalability, performance, availability, security, and backup and recovery in both Amazon RDS and Amazon EC2.

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Zlatan Dzinic
Partner Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
SRV209
Design, Deploy, and Optimize Microsoft
SQL Server Workloads on AWS

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Why are customers choosing to move to AWS?

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What sets AWS apart?
Building and managing cloud since 2006; millions of active customers;
rapid customer-driven releases
Experience & Innovation
Quickly spin up; scale up or down as neededAgility, Elasticity, & Scalability
18 Regions, 55 Availability Zones, 119 Edge Points of PresenceGlobal Footprint
Tens of thousands of partners; 4,000+ AWS Marketplace productsPartner Community
#1 priority; fine-grained control; certifications/accreditationsSecurity
Economies of scale; 65 price drops since inceptionCost Savings

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Innovation for Windows on AWS
Key Windows launches since 2008
89
42
750+
instance types, 22 instance families
different AMIs for Windows workloads
Windows ISV listings
in AWS Marketplace
Windows Deep Learning AMI
Hyper-V support in SMS
Application-consistent Snapshots through VSS
WS 2008 & SQL Server 2008
Visual Studio Toolkit
Microsoft SCOM plugin release
AWS Directory Service
EC2 Dedicated Hosts (BYOL)
Microsoft SharePoint 2016 (Marketplace)
Windows Server 2008 R2
SQL Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2003
SQL Server 2005
.NET SDK
Microsoft SCVMM plugin
Windows Server 2012
SQL Server 2012
AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell
Amazon RDS adds SQL Server
EC2 Run Command
EC2 Systems Manager
Windows Server & SQL Server 2016
EC2 Dedicated Instances (BYOL)
.NET on Lambda &
Codebuild
SAP instance on AWS 2012
Trusted Advisor
checks for Windows
SQL Server 2017
X-Ray .NET SDK
CustomerAdoption
Windows for Lightsail
.NET Core & PowerShell
on AL2/Ubuntu
2008 Today
.NET Core 2.0 Support
with Lambda & X-Ray

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Why are customers choosing to move their SQL Server
workloads to AWS?

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Why are customers choosing to move their SQL Server
workloads to AWS?
“We concluded that migrating to AWS would be the most cost-effective
strategy, and the agility of the AWS Cloud model fit our SQL Server
workloads perfectly. The Ven.ue platform has definitely benefited from the
scalability and performance of AWS, so that gave us a lot of confidence.”
– Mike Gassner, Sr. Vice President, Technology Solutions, Sony DADC New
Media Solutions
“A lot of our SQL Server workloads can push 15,000 IOPs continuously, for
long periods of time. We really liked the performance and value we saw in
the Amazon EC2 I2 instances.”
– Randy Young, Director of Cloud Operations, Infor

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Migrating SQL Server to AWS
Amazon
EC2
Amazon
EBS
Amazon
RDS

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Simple backup/restore migrations
Amazon RDS
Amazon EC2

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What are AWS DMS and AWS SCT?
AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) easily and securely
migrate and/or replicate 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
Over 64,000 databases migrated and counting …

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When to use AWS DMS and AWS SCT?
Modernize Migrate Replicate
Modernize your database tier
• Commercial to open-source
• Commercial to Amazon Aurora
Modernize your Data Warehouse
• Commercial to Amazon Redshift
• Migrate business-critical applications
• Migrate from Classic to VPC
• Migrate data warehouse to Amazon
Redshift
• Upgrade to a minor version
• Consolidate shards into Aurora
• Create cross-regions read replicas
• Run your analytics in the cloud
• Keep your dev/test and production
environment sync

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Where can I run my SQL
Server workloads on AWS?

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Where can I run my SQL Server workloads on AWS?
Amazon Relational Database Service
(Amazon RDS)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(Amazon EC2)
Managed service with up to 32 vCPU, 244-GB RAM, and 16-TB storage
Self-managed virtual machine with up to 128 vCPU, 4-TB RAM, and 400-TB storage

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Amazon RDS for SQL Server SQL Server on Amazon EC2
Power, HVAC, net
OS Install/Maintenance
OS Patching
DBMS Install/Maintenance
DBMS Patching
Database Backups
High Availability
Scaling
AWS managed Customer managed
Power, HVAC, net
OS Install/Maintenance
OS Patching
DBMS Install/Maintenance
DBMS Patching
Database Backups
High Availability
Scaling
• Consider RDS first
• Focus on business
value tasks
• High-level tuning
• Schema optimization
• No in-house database
expertise
• Automatic Host
Replacement
• Need full control over
DB instance
• Replication
• Clustering
• Options that are not
available in
Amazon RDS
Options for Deploying SQL Server on AWS

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Amazon EC2: Flexible Compute Options
Current Instance Families and Generation Family/Usage
M5, M4 General Purpose Compute
T2 Burstable Performance
C5, C4 Compute Optimized
X1, X1E, R5, R5d, R4, R3
Memory
Optimized
P2, G3, F1 Accelerated Computing
I3
Storage Optimized
(I/O)
D2
Storage Optimized
(Density)

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Microsoft licensing on AWS
AWS Licensing
Buy License-included
instances from AWS
Bring Licenses to AWS
Dedicated options for
licenses not eligible for
License Mobility
Default tenancy for License
Mobility eligible products
with Software Assurance

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Amazon EC2 Optimize CPUs

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License Optimization with Optimize CPUs
• Control active vCPUs and Hyper-Threading status
when launching new EC2 instances
• Reduce the number of SQL Server licenses
*Sample licensing example only
Instance Type Total vCPUs Active vCPUs with
Optimize CPUs
SQL Server license
savings
r4.4xlarge 16 8 50%
r4.8xlarge 32 8 75%

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Customer Reference
“With Optimize CPUs our customers, such as a research firm that specializes in research for
the financial services industry, can not only migrate their existing Microsoft SQL Licenses to
Amazon EC2 but do so on instances that are ideally tuned for Memory, CPU, I/O, and
Bandwidth while not having to overprovision CPU cores or acquire additional Microsoft
SQL Licenses, providing a savings of 50% on their licensing.”
Patrick Hannah
Vice President of Engineering

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SQL Server High Availability
and Disaster Recovery
on AWS

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Multi-AZ SQL Server on Amazon RDS
Availability Zone 1
Private Subnet
Availability Zone 2
AWS Region
Amazon
RDS
Primary
Amazon
RDS
Secondary
Private Subnet
Automatic Failover

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Multi-AZ SQL Server on Amazon RDS
Availability Zone 1
Private Subnet
Availability Zone 2
AWS Region
Amazon
RDS
Primary
Amazon
RDS
Secondary
Private Subnet
Automatic FailoverManaged Service

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Multi-AZ Always On Availability Group
Availability Zone 1
Private Subnet
Availability Zone 2
Private Subnet
AWS Region
Amazon
EC2
Primary
Replica
Amazon EC2
Secondary
Replica
Synchronous Commit
Automatic Failover

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Multi-region Always-On Availability Group
Availability Zone 1
Private Subnet
AWS Region A
Availability Zone 2
Private Subnet
Availability Zone 1
Private Subnet
AWS Region B
Elastic IP Elastic IP
VPN
Amazon
EC2
Primary
Replica
Amazon EC2
Secondary
Replica
Amazon EC2
Secondary
Replica
Synchronous Commit
Automatic Failover
Asynchronous Commit
Manual Failover

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Multi-AZ Failover Cluster Instance
Amazon EBS Amazon EBS
Availability Zone 1
Private Subnet
Availability Zone 2
Private Subnet
AWS Region
Amazon
EC2
Primary
Replica
Amazon EC2
Secondary
Replica
Data Replication

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Database and Backup
Storage Options

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AWS has a variety of storage options
Amazon EC2 Instance Store (Ephemeral Volumes)
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Amazon Glacier
AWS Storage Gateway: File Gateway
AWS Snowball & AWS Snowball Edge
AWS Snowmobile

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AWS
block storage
offerings
EC2 instance
store
sc1st1
io1gp2
EBS
SSD-backed
volumes
EBS
HDD-backed
volumes
I2/I3 D2/H1

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What is Amazon EC2 instance store?
• Local to instance
• Non-persistent data store
• SSD or HDD
• Data not replicated (by default)
• No snapshot support
EC2 instances
Physical Host
Instance store
or
* Not all instance types have local, instance storage

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Amazon EC2 instance store use cases
Temporary storage (SQL Server tempdb)
I3 instance type
• Temporary storage (SQL Server tempdb)
• Very low latency (0.1 ms)
• Extremely high IOPS (over 3 million vs. 80K for EBS-optimized)
• Higher throughput (almost 10x EBS max)
D2 instance type
• Up to 48 TB of HDD-based local storage

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Amazon EBS – Lets us do the undifferentiated heavy lifting
Reliable PerformantTransparent
Consistently high
IOPS and throughput
Optimized for
low-latency workloads
Minimal re-architecting
for applications
Adjust performance and
price on the fly
Highly Available
Failure Tolerant
Foundational for
enterprise applications

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Amazon EBS
• Persistent block level storage for EC2
• Pay only for what you provision
• Native redundancy and write cache
• Consistent and low-latency performance
• Optimized for random I/O
• Native support for encryption at rest (data volumes)

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Amazon EBS volume types
HDDSSD
Provisioned IOPS
$0.125 per GiB
$0.065 per PIOPS
io1
General Purpose
$0.10 per GiB
gp2
Throughput Optimized
$0.045 per GiB
st1 sc1
Cold
$0.025 per GiB
Snapshot storage for all volume types is $0.05 per GiB per month
* All prices are per month, prorated to the second, and from the us-west-2 Region as of April 2018

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Choosing an Amazon EBS volume type
Throughput
is more important
Small, random I/O Large, sequential I/O
i3
gp2 io1 sc1 st1
d2
Latency?
< 1 ms Single-digit ms ≤ 1,750 MiB/s
Aggregate throughput?
> 1,750 MiB/s
Which is more important?
Cost Performance
IOPS
≤ 80,000> 80,000
is more important
Which is more important?
Cost Performance

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Amazon EC2 instance sizing for EBS-optimized
m4.large
2 vCPU
8-GiB RAM
Dedicated to EBS
450 Mbps ~ 56.25 MiB/s
2 TiB GP2 volume:
6,000 IOPS
160 MiB/s max throughput
3,600 16K IOPS

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Amazon EC2 instance sizing for EBS-optimized
m4.large
2 vCPU
8-GiB RAM
Dedicated to EBS
450 Mbps ~ 56.25 MiB/s
2 TiB GP2 volume:
6,000 IOPS
160 MiB/s max throughput
3,600 16K IOPS
m4.2xlarge
8 vCPU
32-GiB RAM
Dedicated to EBS
1 Gbps ~ 125 MiB/s
8,000 16K IOPS
2 TiB GP2 volume:
6,000 IOPS
160 MiB/s max throughput

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Databases on Amazon EBS: Storage best practices
• io1 for critical workloads
• st1 for backups (along with Amazon S3 & Amazon Glacier)
We’ve seen much stronger performance for our database-backup workloads
with the Amazon EBS st1 volumes, and we’re also saving 75% on our monthly
backup costs.
Randy Young, Director of Cloud Operations, Infor
• Local, instance storage only for temp data

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Advanced Amazon EBS
Working with multiple volumes

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Best practice: RAID
When to RAID?
• Storage requirement >16 TiB
• Throughput requirement >500 MiB/s
• Largest instance can support up to 1,750 MiB/s
• IOPS requirement >32,000 @ 16K
• Largest instance can support up to 75,000 @ 16K
EBS EBS EBS

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Best practice: RAID
Avoid RAID for redundancy
• Amazon EBS data is already replicated
• RAID1 halves available Amazon EBS bandwidth
• RAID5/6 loses 20% to 30% of usable I/O to parity
EBS EBS EBS

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Windows 2016 and Storage Spaces Direct (S2D)
Storage availability and scalability connected to multiple servers
Converged: Scale out file server for network-attached storage over
SMB3 file shares
Hyperconverged: run SQL Server alongside S2D on the same
server—supports SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances
- requires NVMe driver; recommend R5 or R5d

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Migration Partners
+thousands of additional APN partners
Microsoft Competency Partners
Partners help scale differentiated solutions

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