Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) | Hardware and Scaling Flashcards
How do the payment options impact my bill?
Hardware and Scaling
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) | Database
When you purchase an RI under the All Upfront payment option, you pay for the entire term of the RI in one upfront payment. You can choose to pay nothing upfront by choosing the No Upfront option. The entire value of the No Upfront RI is spread across every hour in the term and you will be billed for every hour in the term, regardless of usage. The Partial Upfront payment option is a hybrid of the All Upfront and No Upfront options. You make a small upfront payment, and you are billed a low hourly rate for every hour in the term regardless of usage.
How do I determine which initial DB instance class and storage capacity are appropriate for my needs?
Hardware and Scaling
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) | Database
In order to select your initial DB instance class and storage capacity, you will want to assess your application’s compute, memory and storage needs. For information the about the DB instance classes available, please refer to the Amazon RDS User Guide.
How do I scale the compute resources and/or storage capacity associated with my Amazon RDS Database Instance?
Hardware and Scaling
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) | Database
You can scale the compute resources and storage capacity allocated to your DB instance with the AWS Management Console (selecting the desired DB instance and clicking the Modify button), the RDS API, or the AWS Command Line Interface. Memory and CPU resources are modified by changing your DB Instance class, and storage available is changed when you modify your storage allocation. Please note that when you modify your DB Instance class or allocated storage, your requested changes will be applied during your specified maintenance window. Alternately, you can use the “apply-immediately” flag to apply your scaling requests immediately. Bear in mind that any other pending system changes will be applied as well.
Monitor the compute and storage resource utilization of your DB instance, for no additional charge, via Amazon CloudWatch. You can access metrics such as CPU utilization, storage utilization, and network traffic by clicking the “Monitoring” tab for your DB Instance in the AWS Management Console or using the Amazon CloudWatch APIs. To learn more about monitoring your active DB Instances, read the Amazon RDS User Guide.
Please note that for SQL Server, because of the extensibility limitations of striped storage attached to a Windows Server environment, Amazon RDS does not currently support increasing storage. While we plan to support this functionality in the future, we recommend you to provision storage based on anticipated future storage growth. In the interim, if you need to increase the storage of a SQL Server DB instance, you will need to export the data, create a new DB Instance with increased storage, and import the data into it. Please refer to the data import guide for SQL Server for more information.
What is the hardware configuration for Amazon RDS storage?
Hardware and Scaling
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) | Database
Amazon RDS uses EBS volumes for database and log storage. Depending on the size of storage requested, Amazon RDS automatically stripes across multiple EBS volumes to enhance IOPS performance. For MySQL and Oracle, for an existing DB instance, you may observe some I/O capacity improvement if you scale up your storage. You can scale the storage capacity allocated to your DB Instance using the AWS Management Console, the ModifyDBInstance API, or the modify-db-instance command.
However, for SQL Server, because of the extensibility limitations of striped storage attached to a Windows Server environment, Amazon RDS does not currently support increasing storage.
For more information, see Storage for Amazon RDS.
Will my DB instance remain available during scaling?
Hardware and Scaling
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) | Database
The storage capacity allocated to your DB Instance can be increased while maintaining DB Instance availability. However, when you decide to scale the compute resources available to your DB instance up or down, your database will be temporarily unavailable while the DB instance class is modified. This period of unavailability typically lasts only a few minutes, and will occur during the maintenance window for your DB Instance, unless you specify that the modification should be applied immediately.
How can I scale my DB instance beyond the largest DB instance class and maximum storage capacity?
Hardware and Scaling
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) | Database
Amazon RDS supports a variety of DB instance classes and storage allocations to meet different application needs. If your application requires more compute resources than the largest DB instance class or more storage than the maximum allocation, you can implement partitioning, thereby spreading your data across multiple DB instances.
What is Amazon RDS General Purpose (SSD) storage?
Hardware and Scaling
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) | Database
Amazon RDS General Purpose (SSD) Storage is suitable for a broad range of database workloads that have moderate I/O requirements. With the baseline of 3 IOPS/GB and ability to burst up to 3,000 IOPS, this storage option provides predictable performance to meet the needs of most applications.
What is Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS (SSD) storage?
Hardware and Scaling
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) | Database
Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS (SSD) Storage is an SSD-backed storage option designed to deliver fast, predictable, and consistent I/O performance. With Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS (SSD) Storage, you specify an IOPS rate when creating a DB instance, and Amazon RDS provisions that IOPS rate for the lifetime of the DB instance. Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS (SSD) Storage is optimized for I/O-intensive, transactional (OLTP) database workloads. For more details, please see the Amazon RDS User Guide.
What is Amazon RDS Magnetic storage?
Hardware and Scaling
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) | Database
Amazon RDS magnetic storage is useful for small database workloads where data is accessed less frequently. Magnetic storage is not recommended for production database instances.
How do I choose among the Amazon RDS storage types?
Hardware and Scaling
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) | Database
Choose the storage type most suited for your workload.
High-performance OLTP workloads: Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS (SSD) Storage
Database workloads with moderate I/O requirements: Amazon RDS General Purpose (SSD) Storage
