AWS Marketplace

Intel and Cintra optimize Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

This post explores how Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) and Cintra‘s full-stack optimization, from silicon to software, can modernize Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL, delivering substantial performance improvement based on HammerDB benchmarks. These gains can lead to faster application interactions, quicker reporting, and more efficient data processing for your critical workloads.

Customers are increasingly transitioning from legacy databases to open-source databases such as PostgreSQL, gaining database freedom from vendor lock-in, eliminating licensing costs, and benefiting from cloud-based innovation. For example, in 2019, Amazon successfully migrated 75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 databases to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with little or no downtime. This reduced latency by 40 percent for customer-facing applications and delivered 60 percent reduced costs.

Enhance your Amazon RDS database workloads

By properly optimizing your database migration, you can unlock cost savings and performance improvements to enhance your cloud experience. According to an Intel report, 40 percent of organizations see opportunities to improve cloud optimization, creating valuable potential for savings and increased efficiency.

For organizations seeking streamlined migration solutions, AWS Marketplace offers a range of tools and services to support database modernization efforts. Cintra, an AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner with a team of cloud database architects, delivers assessment, migration, and modernization services, addressing these challenges with its REMAPPED.AI product. REMAPPED.AI performs database-centric discovery of workloads to precisely right-size, optimize, and accelerate performance, providing optimal user experiences and cost management.

Cintra’s optimization journey involves three steps: database assessment, implementation, and monitoring. In partnership with Intel, Cintra facilitates the smooth transition of Oracle workloads to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL while enhancing existing PostgreSQL workloads on AWS or Amazon RDS. Intel is an AWS Partner and global organization with a focus on semiconductor manufacturing and technology innovation. Cintra is part of the Accelerated by Intel® program, which enables industry partners to get to market faster with preoptimized, test and deployment ready solutions.

All Accelerated by Intel branded solutions incorporate Intel processors, software tool-based optimizations, or both to help customers quickly bring their innovations to life and deliver exceptional business outcomes.

Seamless implementation for your PostgreSQL workloads

The recommended Intel optimization for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is delivered by Cintra’s cloud database architects and engineers. This process enables implementation with minimal disruption by using Terraform automation to quickly transition your database instances to Intel-optimized Amazon RDS instances.

Accelerating PostgreSQL performance with Intel

Cintra uses the latest Amazon RDS instances based on custom-built 4th generation Intel Xeon processors, available across 7i instances. Intel-powered Amazon RDS instances are exclusively available on AWS, offering advanced hardware designed for cloud efficiency. In addition to hardware enhancements, Intel provides software tools and tuning capabilities, such as customized parameter group files with Intel optimization flag settings, to run PostgreSQL with optimal performance.

To facilitate optimization in Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Cintra provides ready-to-use Terraform scripts and Intel Database Optimization modules. These modules include provisioning scripts to launch Intel instances with refined Amazon RDS parameter groups, streamlining the deployment and configuration of Intel environments. Silicon to software full-stack optimization (Figure 1) offers the highest level of performance on the fewest number of cores, which results in the lowest possible cloud and Oracle licensing costs.

Optimizing performance per core leads to lowest possible cloud and licensing costs.

Figure 1 – Optimizing performance per core leads to lowest possible cloud and licensing costs.

Simplify modernization with an optimization cloud blueprint

This process includes:

  • Setting Intel optimization flags for performance tuning.
  • Enhancing storage capacity and I/O operations per second (IOPS) settings.
  • Fine-tuning the database after deployment.
  • Using synthetic data for performance testing.
  • Selecting the right instance for application-level tuning (optional).

Comprehensive test implementation

Before full production implementation, Intel and Cintra plan a comprehensive test process to validate optimization results. This includes testing the custom Intel parameter groups against default parameter groups currently in production. Intel provides direct engineering support for testing environment setup and methodology, providing an optimal setting for validation. Deploying Intel Database Optimization modules in a development environment requires no additional engineering efforts.

Continuous monitoring for long-term success

Following implementation, Cintra provides ongoing monitoring to track and document cost savings and performance improvements from Intel-powered Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instances.

Cintra offers continuous performance tracking to maintain service level agreement (SLA) compliance and improve database efficiency. Through a continuous improvement cycle, Cintra regularly assesses and fine-tunes performance, service levels, and resource usage so customers benefit from ongoing refinement and cost control. Through predictive tracking you can proactively manage scalability, helping your database environment grow with future business demands (Figure 2).

Cintra helps database discovery and assessment at scale and Intel optimizes database performance.

Figure 2 – Cintra helps database discovery and assessment at scale and Intel optimizes database performance.

Unlock greater database performance with Intel and Cintra

Accelerate your Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database with Intel and Cintra to achieve maximum performance at a lower cost. Enhance your user experience while minimizing time spent on troubleshooting and performance tuning. By reducing costs, you can reinvest savings into business value and innovation.

Ready to get started? Visit Cintra in AWS Marketplace to request your assessment and begin enhancing your PostgreSQL workloads today.

About Authors

Diego Bailón Humpert, Global AWS Compute and Automotive GTM Lead, Intel Corporation

Diego leads the global AWS database go-to-market for Intel. He joined Intel in 2020 and has focused his work on optimizing database practices on AWS with Intel and facilitating database migrations to the AWS Cloud. You can find him on LinkedIn.

Adbul Sheikh, CTO and Founder, Cintra

As the Chief Technology Officer, Abdul has led the company with a singular focus on customer obsession and high-performance database solutions since 1996. This dedication has resulted in customer relationships that typically last 15 years, reflecting how customers view Abdul and his team at Cintra as a reliable database services partner. Cintra’s multi-cloud and multi-database success has been underpinned by first principle thinking, to establish powerful discovery and assessment automation tooling IP, underpinning Cintra’s Cloud Freedom and Database Freedom managed services.

Dylan Souvage, Partner Solutions Architect, AWS

Dylan is a Partner Solutions Architect based in Austin, Texas. Dylan loves working with customers to understand their business needs and enable them in their cloud journey. In his spare time, he enjoys going out in nature and going on long road trips.