Microsoft Workloads on AWS
Author: Alex Zarenin
Alex Zarenin is a Principal Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services. He works with financial services companies designing and implementing a broad array of technical solutions. With domain expertise in Microsoft technologies, Alex has more than 30 years of technical experience in both the commercial and public sectors. Alex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from NYU.
Optimize CPU best practices for SQL Server workloads
In this blog post, we will review the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Optimize CPU feature and provide guidelines for utilizing this feature to reduce Microsoft SQL Server license cost on Amazon Web Services (AWS) without sacrificing SQL Server performance. 1. Introduction Amazon EC2 offers a diverse range of instance types tailored to suit […]
Optimizing protocol selection when using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP for Microsoft SQL Server
In this blog post, we will review advantages and disadvantages of the two storage access protocols, iSCSI and SMB, offered by Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSx for ONTAP). For comparison purposes, we will use Microsoft SQL Server on Windows. We will provide recommendations for selecting the optimal storage access protocol for your specific scenario. […]
Comparing performance of new releases of Babelfish and comparing Babelfish performance with SQL Server
In this blog post, I will compare the performance of the newest releases of Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL and provide performance and price-performance comparisons between Babelfish and Microsoft SQL Server 2022. 1. Introduction Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL is a capability of Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition that enables Aurora to understand commands from applications written for […]
Scaling SQL Server performance beyond 1M transactions per minute with Amazon FSx
In this blog post, we introduce a strategy for scaling Microsoft SQL Server deployments on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that uses Amazon FSx, a service that provides fully managed, high-performance file systems in the cloud. This strategy increases SQL Server performance on AWS, providing 2 to 3 times as many Transactions per Minute (TPM) as […]
Do AWS customers benefit from 64KB block size for SQL Server storage?
In this blog post, we will share results of Microsoft SQL Server performance testing using Amazon FSx for Windows File Server (Amazon FSx) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) with block sizes in the range of 16 KB to 64 KB to prove or disprove the common opinion that SQL Server requires 64KB block […]
Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL Performance Testing Results
In this blog post, I will share results for Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL performance testing using the HammerDB database benchmarking tool. Based upon the results of testing various Aurora for PostgreSQL clusters hosting Babelfish, I will also provide recommendations on the optimal instance selection from the price-performance viewpoint. This blog post concludes with a summary […]
Setting up Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL for performance testing using HammerDB
In this blog post, I will provide details on how to set up Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL for performance analysis using the HammerDB performance tool. 1. Introduction Whether it’s a component of migrating to AWS or optimizing workloads already on AWS, customers are looking at the options to modernize their SQL Server workloads. An attractive […]
Instrumenting .NET applications with AWS X-Ray using Aspect-oriented Programming
Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is an approach that enhances modularity by allowing developers to pull out cross-cutting concerns. AOP does so by adding attribute (advice) to the existing code without modifying the code itself. Classic examples of these cross-cutting concerns include caching, logging, monitoring, and, in our case, AWS X-Ray tracing. With AOP, tracing a call […]