Amazon RDS in AWS GovCloud (US) now supports Provisioned IOPS and M3 Instance Types

Posted on: May 28, 2014

We have four pieces of good news to share regarding Amazon RDS in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. First, you can provision up to 3 TB in storage and up to 30,000 IOPS for your database instances (maximum realized IOPS will vary by engine type). Second, you can convert an existing Amazon RDS instance that uses standard storage to use Provisioned IOPS storage. Third, you can scale IOPS and storage independently. And, finally, you can now launch M3 database instances. Here are the details:

Provision up to 3TB storage and 30,000 IOPS: You can now provision up to 3TB storage and 30,000 IOPS per database instance – three times the previous limit of 1 TB and 10,000 IOPS per database instance. For a workload with 50% writes and 50% reads running on an m2.4xlarge instance, you can realize up to 25,000 IOPS with Oracle and PostgreSQL and 12,500 IOPS with MySQL. However, by provisioning up to 30,000 IOPS, you may be able to achieve lower latency and higher throughput. For SQL Server you can provision up to 10,000 IOPS and 1 TB of allocated storage. Your actual realized IOPS may vary from the amount you provisioned based on your database workload, instance type, and database engine choice. Refer to the Factors That Affect Realized IOPS section of the documentation to learn more.

Convert an existing database instance to use Provisioned IOPS storage: You can now convert database instances using standard storage to use Provisioned IOPS storage and get consistent throughput and low I/O latencies. Use the "Modify" action for your database instance on the DB Instances page of the AWS Management Console, check the "Use Provisioned IOPS" check box, specify the number of IOPS required for your workload, and proceed through the wizard. You can also perform this operation via the Amazon RDS APIs and the Command Line Interface.

Scale storage and IOPS independently: You can now scale IOPS (in increments of 1000) and storage independently. The ratio of IOPS provisioned to the storage requested (in GB) should be between 3 and 10. For example, for a database instance with 1000 GB of storage, you can provision from 3,000 to 10,000 IOPS. You can scale the IOPS up or down depending on factors such as seasonal variability of traffic to your applications.

M3 Instance Type Support: 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. 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.

You are also invited to attend the AWS GovCloud (US) Solutions Architect Office Hours on June 3rd and the Introduction to AWS GovCloud (US) webinar with the AWS GovCloud (US) team on June 11th, where you can learn more about the AWS GovCloud (US) region and the new RDS offerings.