Lower prices, better performance with Amazon RDS Memory Optimized DB Instances

Posted on: May 28, 2014

You can now take advantage of the R3 instance type with Amazon RDS. R3 instances are optimized for memory-intensive applications, have the lowest cost per GiB of RAM among Amazon RDS instance types, and are recommended for high performance database workloads. These new instances feature the latest Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge processors and deliver higher sustained memory bandwidth with lower network latency and jitter at prices up to 28% lower than comparable M2 DB Instances.

Of these new DB instances, db.r3.xlarge, db.r3.2xlarge, and db.r3.4xlarge are optimized for Provisioned IOPS storage. For a workload with 50% writes and 50% reads running on db.r3.8xlarge instance type, it is possible to realize up to 20,000 IOPS for MySQL and 25,000 IOPS for PostgreSQL. Refer to the Provisioned IOPS storage section of the User Guide to learn more.

To take advantage of R3 instance types for RDS, you can either launch a new instance of a supported engine type, or perform an instance scale operation on an instance running a supported engine type. We currently support PostgreSQL, SQL Server and MySQL version 5.6 database engines for R3 instances, with support for MySQL version 5.1 and 5.5 coming soon. Amazon RDS for MySQL customers running MySQL 5.5 who wish to take advantage of R3 instances now should first upgrade from MySQL 5.5 to MySQL 5.6 before performing an instance scale operation.

Pricing for R3 database instances starts at $0.089/hour (effective price) for 3 year Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances and $0.240/hour for On-Demand usage. These pricing examples are for MySQL instances in the US West (Oregon) AWS Region. For more information on pricing, visit the Amazon RDS pricing page.

These new instances are available in all AWS regions except GovCloud (US), China (Beijing), and South America (São Paulo). Support for RDS R3 instances is coming to those regions in the future.

To learn more about R3 instances, view the RDS instance class table.