Posted On: Sep 4, 2013
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new High Memory Amazon RDS database instance type (db.cr1.8xlarge) for high performance database workloads. We currently support the MySQL database engine version 5.6 for this instance type.
AWS customers run a wide range of database workloads on Amazon RDS and have ever expanding memory, compute and IOPS requirements. This new instance type has 244GB of memory and 88ECUs of compute capacity (2 Intel Xeon E5-2670 8-core processors). This instance also operates on a high bandwidth network. For a workload with 50% writes and 50% reads running on this instance type, it is possible to realize up to 20,000 IOPS for MySQL, which is 60% more than previously realizable maximum IOPS of 12,500. Your actual results may vary depending on your workload characteristics. These specifications make this instance type an ideal candidate for high performance workloads in enterprise, social media, mobile applications or gaming.
Please note that Amazon RDS for MySQL (version 5.6) provides support for both SQL and Memcached API access to the underlying data in your database. This means that using db.cr1.8xlarge with MySQL 5.6, you can architect applications that use SQL for complex transactions and joins as well as Memcached APIs for high performance NoSQL operations – all operating out of one database. In addition, with 244GB of available memory, you may be able to configure MySQL to fit most OLTP databases (typically 100GB or less) fully in memory and achieve the best possible performance.
The db.cr1.8xlarge provides 3.6 times the memory and 3.4 times the compute capacity of db.m2.4xlarge, but only costs about 2.1 times that of db.m2.4xlarge. You may be able to consolidate your workloads from multiple smaller instances (read replicas/write shards/cache nodes for example) to fewer db.cr1.8xlarge instances, and reduce network latencies as well as minimize overall administrative effort and cost.
Pricing starts at $2.074 per hour (effective price) for 3 year Heavy Utilization and $4.725 per hour for On-demand usage in US East (Northern Virginia) and US West (Oregon). This instance type is also available for MySQL 5.6 in EU (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). For more information on pricing, visit the Amazon RDS pricing page.