Amazon RDS now offers new faster and cheaper DB instances

Posted on: Feb 20, 2014

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of a set of new M3 database instances for Amazon RDS. These new instances provide you with a similar ratio of CPU and memory resources as our previous M1 database instances but offer 50% more computational capability/core, significantly improving overall compute capacity. These new instances are priced about 6% lower than M1 instances, providing you with significantly higher and more consistent compute performance at a lower price.

These new instances are available for all database engines and in all AWS regions, with AWS GovCloud (US) support coming in the future.

Out of these new DB instances, the db.m3.xlarge and db.m3.2xlarge are optimized for Provisioned IOPS storage. For a workload with 50% writes and 50% reads running on db.m3.2xlarge instance type, it is possible to realize up to 12,500 IOPS for MySQL and 25,000 IOPS for Oracle and PostgreSQL. Refer to the Provisioned IOPS storage section of the User Guide to learn more.

Pricing for M3 database instances start at $0.053/hour (effective price) for 3 year Heavy Utilization RI and $0.150/hour for On-demand usage in the US West (Oregon) Region for MySQL. For more information on pricing, visit the Amazon RDS pricing page.