Amazon RDS – Support for Second Generation Standard Instances

Amazon RDS makes it easy for you to set up, scale, and run a relational database. Today we are making RDS even better with the introduction of the second generation (M3) of the Standard DB instance family. This new generation supports the db.m3.medium, db.m3.large, db.m3.xlarge, and db.m3.2xlarge instance types. These instances have a similar CPU to memory ratio as the first generation Standard (M1) instances, but offer 50% more compute capability per core.

Better Price/Performance
Prices for the M3 instances are about 6% lower than those for the similarly named M1 instances. As a result, you get significantly higher and more consistent compute power at a lower price when you use these instances.

The db.m3.xlarge and the db.m3.2xlarge instances offer dedicated capacity and are optimized for the use of Provisioned IOPS storage. It is possible to realize up to 12,500 IOPS for MySQL and 25,000 IOPS for Oracle and PostgreSQL on a workload consisting of 50% reads and 50% writes, when running on a db.m3.2xlarge instance. For more information, refer to the Working With Provisioned IOPS section of the RDS User Guide.

Easy Upgrade
You can upgrade your existing RDS DB instances by simply modifying the instance type:

You can select Apply Immediately for nearly instant gratification, or you can leave it unchecked to wait for the next maintenance window. This operation will briefly impact availability. For a Multi-AZ instance, this impact will typically last less than two minutes. This is the amount of time that it takes for a failover from primary to secondary to complete.

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

— Jeff;