Showing posts with label AWS RDS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AWS RDS. Show all posts

Wednesday 3 October 2012

Amazon RDS - Now Available in the AWS Free Usage Tier

Good News!!!

AWS has announced AWS RDS Support in AWS Free Usage Tier. Prior to this, AWS only supported AWS RDS - SQL Server in Free tier, such as:
 

AWS RDS Free Tier old
Earlier

 
But starting today, AWS has announced support for all databases of AWS RDS :


AWS RDS Free Tier new
Starting October 1st, 2012



NOTE:
* These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details). Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.

Amazon RDS free tier is currently not available in VPC.


Read below abstract from Jeff's post on AWS Blog :

[...]  Our customers appreciate the fact that they can launch DB Instances on demand at very affordable hourly rates, with the option to purchase Reserved DB Instances to reduce their costs even more. Here's a video (featuring Biswaroop Palit of the Amazon RDS team) with more information about what RDS is and how it will simplify your life:



 
We are now adding RDS to the AWS Free Usage Tier. New AWS customers (see the AWS Free Usage Tier FAQ for eligibility details) can use the MySQL, Oracle (BYOL licensing model), or SQL Server database engines on a Micro DB Instance for up to 750 hours per month, along with 20 GB of database storage, 10 million I/Os and 20 GB of backup storage. When you combine this new capability with the existing EC2 usage available on the Free Usage Tier, you may be to build and run a complete multi-tiered web application without spending a penny. Here's another video with more information on this important new development:
 


 
AWS WEBINAR
 
In order to help you to get the most from Amazon RDS on Oracle, we'll be hosting a free RDS webinar at 10:00 AM (PT) on October 18th.
 
Attend the webinar to learn how RDS lets you focus on your business by addressing the key pain points that come with Oracle database administration.
 
 

Friday 28 September 2012

Amazon RDS Now Supports SQL Server 2012

Want to try SQL Server 2012 ? Now dont invest in hardware and software. AWS RDS now supports SQL Server 2012 with easy to use interface and very affordable prices.

With added support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012, Amazon RDS customers can use the new features Microsoft has introduced as part of SQL Server 2012 including improvements to manageability, performance, programmability, and security.

Read more below extract from Jeff's Blog on the announcement :
The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports SQL Server 2012.You can now launch the Express, Web, and Standard Editions of this powerful database from the comfort of the AWS Management Console. SQL Server 2008 R2 is still available, as are multiple versions and editions of MySQL and Oracle Database.

If you are from the Microsoft world and haven't heard of RDS, here's the executive summary:

You can run the latest and greatest offering from Microsoft in a fully managed environment. RDS will install and patch the database, make backups, and detect and recover from failures. It will also provide you with a point-and-click environment to make it easy for you to scale your compute resources up and down as needed.

What's New?

SQL Server 2012 supports a number of new features including contained databases, columnstore indexes, sequences, and user-defined roles:

  • A contained database is isolated from other SQL Server databases including system databases such as "master." This isolation removes dependencies and simplifies the task of moving databases from one instance of SQL Server to another.
  • Columnstore indexes are used for data warehouse style queries. Used properly, they can greatly reduce memory consumption and I/O requests for large queries.
  • Sequences are counters that can be used in more than one table.
  • The new user-defined role management system allows users to create custom server roles.

Read the SQL Server What's New documentation to learn more about these and other features.

You can launch SQL Server 2012 from the AWS Management Console. First you select the edition that best meets your needs:




Then you fill in the details (SQL Server 2012 is version 11), and your DB Instance will be launched in a matter of minutes:




Yes, This is Cool!

You can now get started with SQL Server 2012 without having to invest in hardware or buying a license. If you are eligible for the AWS Free Usage Tier,  you can get started without spending a penny. You can launch a DB Instance, evaluate the product, do a trial migration of your data, and learn all about the new features at minimal cost. When the time comes to move your organization to SQL Server 2012, you'll already have experience using it in a real-world environment. 


For more information on what’s new in SQL Server 2012, please visit Microsoft’s SQL Server 2012 MSDN documentation.


To learn more about using RDS for SQL Server 2012, please visit the Amazon RDS for SQL Server detail page, AWS documentation and FAQs.

Thursday 27 September 2012

AWS Announcement : High Performance Provisioned IOPS Storage For Amazon RDS

 
After announcing EBS Provisioned IOPS offering lately which allows you to specify both volume size and volume performance in term of number of I/O operations per second (IOPS),  AWS has now announced High Performance Provisioned IOPS Storage for Amazon RDS.
 
You can now create an RDS database instance and specify your desired level of IOPS in order to get more consistent throughput and performance.

Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is immediately available for new database instances in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), and EU West (Ireland) Regions and AWS plan to launch in other AWS Regions in the coming months.
 
AWs is rolling this out in two phases. Read on more the extract from the announcement on AWS Blog by Jeff.
 
 
    
                   We are rolling this out in two stages. Here's the plan:
 
  • Effective immediately, you can provision new RDS database instances with 1,000 to 10,000 IOPS, and with 100GB to 1 TB of storage for MySQL and Oracle databases. If you are using SQL Server, the maximum IOPS you can provision is 7,000 IOPS. All other RDS features including Multi-AZ, Read Replicas, and the Virtual Private Cloud, are also supported.
  •  
  • In the near future, we plan to provide you with an automated way to migrate existing database instances to Provisioned IOPS storage for the MySQL and Oracle database engines. If you want to migrate an existing database instance to Provisioned IOPS storage immediately, you can export your data and re-import it into a new database instance equipped with Provisioned IOPS storage.

We expect database instances with RDS Provisioned IOPS to be used in demanding situations. For example, they are a perfect host for I/O-intensive transactional (OLTP) workloads.
We recommend that customers running production database workloads use Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS for the best possible performance. (By the way, for mission critical OLTP workloads, you should also consider adding the Amazon RDS Multi-AZ option to improve availability.)


Check out the video with Rahul Pathak of the Amazon RDS team to learn more about this new feature and how some of AWS customers were using it:




Responses from AWS customers :

  • AWS customer Flipboard uses RDS to deliver billions of page flips each month to millions of mobile phone and tablet users. Sang Chi, Data Infrastructure Architect at Flipboard told us:
"We want to provide the best possible reading and content delivery experience for a rapidly growing base of users and publishers. This requires us not only to use a high performance database today but also to continue to improve our performance in the future. Throughput consistency is critical for our workloads. Based on results from our early testing, we are very excited about Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS and the impact it will have on our ability to scale. We’re looking forward to scaling our database applications to tens of thousands of IOPS and achieving consistent throughput to improve the experience for our users."
  • AWS customer Shine Technologies uses RDS for Oracle to build complex solutions for enterprise customers. Adam Kierce, their Director said:
"Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS provided a turbo-boost to our enterprise class database-backed applications. In the past, we have invested hundreds of days in time consuming and costly code based performance tuning, but with Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS we were able to exceed those performance gains in a single day. We have demanding clients in the Energy, Telecommunication, Finance and Retail industries, and we fully expect to move all our Oracle backed products onto AWS using Amazon RDS for Oracle over the next 12 months. The increased performance of Amazon's RDS for Oracle with Provision IOPS is an absolute game changer, because it delivers more (performance) for less (cost)."
 

Tuesday 18 September 2012

Amazon VPC - New Additions

 
AWS has added 3 new features / options to the  Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service.
 
 
PFB extract for the two blogs written by Jeff on the same:
 
 
The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) gives you the power to create a private, isolated section of the AWS Cloud. You have full control of network addressing. Each of your VPCs can include subnets (with access control lists), route tables, and gateways to your existing network and to the Internet.
 
You can connect your VPC to the Internet via an Internet Gateway and enjoy all the flexibility of Amazon EC2 with the added benefits of Amazon VPC. You can also setup an IPsec VPN connection to your VPC, extending your corporate data center into the AWS Cloud. Today we are adding two options to give you additional VPN connection flexibility:
  1. You can now create Hardware VPN connections to your VPC using static routing. This means that you can establish connectivity using VPN devices that do not support BGP such as Cisco ASA and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. You can also use Linux to establish a Hardware VPN connection to your VPC. In fact, any IPSec VPN implementation should work.
  2. You can now configure automatic propagation of routes from your VPN and Direct Connect links (gateways) to your VPC's routing tables. This will make your life easier as you won’t need to create static route entries in your VPC route table for your VPN connections. For instance, if you’re using dynamically routed (BGP) VPN connections, your BGP route advertisements from your home network can be automatically propagated into your VPC routing table.
If your VPN hardware is capable of supporting BGP, this is still the preferred way to go as BGP performs a robust liveness check on the IPSec tunnel. Each VPN connection uses two tunnels for redundancy; BGP simplifies the failover procedure that is invoked when one VPN tunnel goes down.

Saturday 15 September 2012

Amazon RDS News - Oracle Data Pump

The Amazon RDS team is rolling out new features at a very rapid clip.
The most awaited feature - Oracle Data Pump is finally here.

Extract from blog post by Jeff:
Customers have asked us to make it easier to import their existing databases into Amazon RDS. We are making it easy for you to move data on and off of the DB Instances by using Oracle Data Pump. A number of scenarios are supported including:
  • Transfer between an on-premises Oracle database and an RDS DB Instance.
  • Transfer between an Oracle database running on an EC2 instance and an RDS DB Instance.
  • Transfer between two RDS DB Instances.
These transfers can be run in either direction. We currently support the network mode of Data Pump where the job source is an Oracle database. Transfers using Data Pump should be considerably faster than those using the original Import and Export utilities. Oracle Data Pump is available on all new DB Instances running Oracle Database 11.2.0.2.v5. To use Data Pump with your existing v3 and v4 instances, please upgrade to v5 by following the directions in the RDS User Guide. To learn more about importing and exporting data from your Oracle databases, check out our new import/export guide.

For those who are not aware what Oracle Data Pump is -

Oracle Data Pump is a feature of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 that enables very fast bulk data and metadata movement between Oracle databases. Oracle Data Pump provides new high-speed, parallel Export and Import utilities (expdp and impdp) as well as a Web-based Oracle Enterprise Manager interface.

  • Data Pump Export and Import utilities are typically much faster than the original Export and Import Utilities. A single thread of Data Pump Export is about twice as fast as original Export, while Data Pump Import is 15-45 times fast than original Import.
  • Data Pump jobs can be restarted without loss of data, whether or not the stoppage was voluntary or involuntary.
  • Data Pump jobs support fine-grained object selection. Virtually any type of object can be included or excluded in a Data Pump job.
  • Data Pump supports the ability to load one instance directly from another (network import) and unload a remote instance (network export).

Tuesday 21 August 2012

Deploy a .NET Application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Amazon RDS Using Visual Studio

In this video, walk you through deploying an application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk (link: http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/), configuring an Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instance (link: http://aws.amazon.com/rds/), and managing your configuration, all from the confines of Visual Studio. The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio streamlines your development, deployment, and testing inside your familiar IDE.
To learn more about AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon RDS, visit the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide at http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/create_deploy_NE....



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