Amazon RDS now supports new General Purpose (SSD) storage type

Posted on: Oct 9, 2014

You can now launch DB Instances that use General Purpose (SSD) storage, a new SSD-backed storage option for Amazon RDS. This new storage option is designed to offer more cost-effective performance than previous choices for a variety of database workloads.

General Purpose (SSD) storage delivers a consistent baseline of 3 IOPS per provisioned GB and provides the ability to burst up to 3,000 IOPS. Pricing for Amazon RDS General Purpose (SSD) is also simple and predictable. You pay for each GB of storage you provision, and there are no additional charges for I/O requests. Prices start as low as $0.115 per GB per month.

You can now choose among three Amazon RDS storage types to best meet the needs of your database workloads.

  • 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 the ability to burst up to 3,000 IOPS, this storage option provides predictable performance to meet the needs of most applications.
  • Provisioned IOPS (SSD) storage is ideal for I/O-intensive transactional (OLTP) database workloads. It provides the most consistent performance and gives you the flexibility to provision the level of IOPS (ranging from 1000 to 30,000) needed for your application.
  • Magnetic storage (formerly known as RDS Standard storage) is useful for small database workloads where data is accessed less frequently.

Amazon RDS General Purpose (SSD) storage can be used in conjunction with RDS features like Multi-AZ, Read Replicas, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). It is available with each of Amazon RDS's supported database engines: MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and SQL Server. It is available in all AWS Regions except GovCloud (US); support in GovCloud (US) is coming soon.

To learn more about Amazon RDS storage choices, visit the Amazon RDS User's Guide.