In this session, we dive deep on best practices and design considerations for running Microsoft SQL Server on AWS. We cover how to choose between running SQL Server on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS. We also cover how to optimize the performance of SQL Server on AWS, how to leverage the new the Optimize CPU feature, and how to deploy SQL Server on Linux. We also review best practices for storage, monitoring, availability, security, and backup and recovery for SQL Server.

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Design, Deploy, and Optimize
Microsoft SQL Server Workloads
on AWS
Wojtek Piaseczny
Sr. Manager, Amazon RDS
Amazon Web Services
Veronika Durgin
Manager, Data Systems
Sonos
W I N 3 2 4 - R

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Why are customers choosing to move their SQL Server
workloads to AWS?

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What sets AWS apart?
Building and managing cloud since 2006; millions of active customers;
rapid customer-driven releases
Experience & innovation
Quickly spin up; scale up or down as neededAgility, elasticity, & scalability
19 Regions, 57 Availability Zones, 119 Edge Points of PresenceGlobal footprint
Tens of thousands of partners; 4,000+ AWS Marketplace productsPartner community
#1 priority; fine-grained control; certifications/accreditationsSecurity
Economies of scale; 65 price drops since inceptionCost savings

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Innovation for Windows on AWS
KeyWindowslaunchessince2008
90+
40+
750+
instance types, 22 instance families
different AMIs for Windows workloads
Windows ISV listings
in AWS Marketplace
Windows Deep Learning AMI
Hyper-V support in SMS
Application-consistent snapshots through VSS
WS 2008 & SQL Server 2008
Visual Studio Toolkit
Microsoft SCOM plugin release
AWS Directory Service
Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts (BYOL)
Microsoft SharePoint 2016 (Marketplace)
Windows Server 2008 R2
SQL Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2003
SQL Server 2005
.NET SDK
Microsoft SCVMM plugin
Windows Server 2012
SQL Server 2012
AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell
Amazon RDS adds SQL Server
EC2 Run Command
Amazon EC2 Systems Manager
Windows Server & SQL Server 2016
Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances (BYOL)
.NET on AWS Lambda &
AWS CodeBuild
SAP instance on AWS 2012
AWS Trusted Advisor
checks for Windows
SQL Server 2017 Windows & Linux
X-Ray .NET SDK
Customeradoption
Windows for Lightsail
.NET Core & PowerShell on
AL2/Ubuntu
2008 Today
.NET Core 2.0 Support with
Lambda & AWS X-Ray

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SQL Server on AWS
Design Migrate Manage/Optimize

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Where can I run my SQL
Server workloads on AWS?

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Where can I run my SQL Server workloads on AWS?
Amazon Relational Database Service
(Amazon RDS)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(Amazon EC2)
Managed service with up to 64 vCPU, 488 GB RAM, and 16 TB storage
Self-managed virtual machine with up to 128 vCPU, 4 TB RAM, and 400 TB storage

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Amazon RDS for SQL Server SQL Server on Amazon EC2
Power, HVAC, net
OS install/maintenance
OS patching
DBMS install/maintenance
DBMS patching
Database backups
High availability
Scaling
AWS managed Customer managed
Power, HVAC, net
OS install/maintenance
OS Patching
DBMS install/maintenance
DBMS Patching
database backups
High availability
Scaling
• Consider RDS first
• Focus on business
value tasks
• High-level tuning
• Schema optimization
• No in-house database
expertise
• Automatic host
replacement
• Need full control over
DB instance
• Replication
• Clustering
• Options that are not
available in
Amazon RDS
Options for deploying SQL Server on AWS

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SQL Server architecture design decisions
RAM Processing Storage
Network High availability Disaster recovery

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SQL Server 2017 on Linux
Benefits
Multi-Linux distribution support (for
example, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu,
RHEL)
Supports containers
Flexibility – Language support (for
example, Java, Ruby)
Performance – Fast queries
Security – Reduced attach surface
Cost – No OS licensing
Simplicity – Ease of migration
SQL Server Editions
Express
Web
Standard
Enterprise
Available AMIs

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Amazon EC2: Purpose-built compute families
Current instance families and generation Family/usage
M5, M4 General purpose compute
T2 Burstable performance
C5, C4 Compute optimized
X1, X1E, R5, R5d, R4, R3
Memory
optimized
P2, G3, F1 Accelerated computing
I3
Storage optimized
(I/O)
D2
Storage optimized
(density)

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Amazon EC2: Scaling to meet your needs
Model vCPU Mem (GiB) Networking perf. SSD storage (GB)
r5d.large 2 16 Up to 10 gigabit 1 x 75 NVMe SSD
r5d.xlarge 4 32 Up to 10 gigabit 1 x 150 NVMe SSD
r5d.2xlarge 8 64 Up to 10 gigabit 1 x 300 NVMe SSD
r5d.4xlarge 16 128 Up to 10 gigabit 2 x 300 NVMe SSD
r5d.12xlarge 48 384 10 gigabit 2 x 900 NVMe SSD
r5d.24xlarge 96 768 25 gigabit 4 x 900 NVMe SSD

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License optimization with Optimize CPUs
• Control active vCPUs and hyper-threading status
when launching new EC2 instances
• Reduce the number of SQL Server licenses
*Sample licensing example only
Instance type Total vCPUs Active vCPUs with
Optimize CPUs
SQL Server license
savings
r5.4xlarge 16 8 50%
r5.12xlarge 48 8 83%

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How do I use Optimize CPU?
Set with AWS CLI run-instances
--cpu-options “CoreCount=x,ThreadsPerCore=y”
View with AWS CLI describe-instances
“CpuOptions”: {“CoreCount”: x, “ThreadsPerCore”: y}
Alternatively, set with AWS SDK or Amazon EC2 API

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Customer reference
“With Optimize CPUs our customers, such as a research firm that specializes in research
for the financial services industry, can not only migrate their existing Microsoft SQL
Licenses to Amazon EC2 but do so on instances that are ideally tuned for Memory, CPU,
IO, and Bandwidth while not having to overprovision CPU cores or acquire additional
Microsoft SQL Licenses, providing a savings of 50% on their licensing.”
Patrick Hannah
Vice President of Engineering

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Database and backup
storage options

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AWS has a variety of storage options
Amazon EC2 instance store (ephemeral volumes)
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Amazon Glacier
AWS Storage Gateway: File Gateway
AWS Snowball & AWS Snowball Edge
AWS Snowmobile

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Data/logs
EC2
Instance
Store
sc1st1
io1gp2
EBS
SSD-backed
volumes
EBS
HDD-backed
volumes
I2/I3 D2/H1
Database storage
Backups AmazonS
3

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Amazon EBS
• Persistent block-level storage for Amazon EC2
• Pay only for what you provision
• Native redundancy and write cache
• Consistent and low-latency performance
• Optimized for random I/O
• Native support for encryption at rest (data volumes)
• Adjust performance and price on the fly
GP2 IO1
Most Workloads Critical Workloads
Predictable burst and baseline I/O intensive workloads

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Amazon EC2 instance sizing for EBS-optimized
m4.large
2 vCPU
8-GiB RAM
Dedicated to Amazon
EBS
450 Mbps ~ 56.25 MiB/s
2 TiB GP2 volume:
6,000 IOPS
160 MiB/s max throughput
3,600 16K IOPS

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Amazon EC2 Instance sizing for EBS-optimized
m4.large
2 vCPU
8-GiB RAM
450 Mbps ~ 56.25 MiB/s
2 TiB GP2 volume:
6,000 IOPS
160 MiB/s max throughput
3,600 16K IOPS
m4.2xlarge
8 vCPU
32-GiB RAM
Dedicated to EBS
1 Gbps ~ 125 MiB/s
8,000 16K IOPS
2 TiB GP2 volume:
6,000 IOPS
160 MiB/s max throughput
Dedicated to Amazon
EBS

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What is Amazon EC2 instance store?
• Local to instance
• Non-persistent data store
• SSD or HDD
• Data not replicated (by default)
• No snapshot support
EC2 instances
Physical host
Instance store
or
* Not all instance types have local, instance storage

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Amazon EC2 instance store use cases
Temporary storage (SQL Server TempDB)
R5d instance type
• Temporary storage (SQL Server TempDB)
• Very low latency (0.1 ms)
• Extremely high IOPS (over 3 million vs. 80K for EBS-optimized)
• Higher throughput (almost 10x EBS max)
D2 instance type
• Up to 48 TB of HDD-based local storage

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Databases on Amazon EBS: Storage best practices
• Local, instance storage only for temp data
• io1 for critical workloads
• st1 for backups (along with Amazon S3 & Amazon Glacier)
“We’ve seen much stronger performance for our database-backup workloads with the Amazon EBS
st1 volumes, and we’re also saving 75% on our monthly backup costs.”
Randy Young, Director of Cloud Operations, Infor

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SQL Server high availability
and disaster recovery on AWS

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Multi-AZ Always On availability group
Availability Zone 1
Private subnet
Availability Zone 2
Private subnet
AWS Region
Amazon
EC2
primary
replica
Amazon EC2
secondary
replica
Synchronous commit
automatic failover

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Multi-region Always On Availability Group
Availability Zone 1
Private subnet
AWS Region A
Availability Zone 2
Private subnet
Availability Zone 1
Private subnet
AWS Region B
Elastic IP Elastic IP
VPN
Amazon
EC2
primary
replica
Amazon EC2
secondary
replica
Amazon EC2
secondary
replica
Synchronous commit
automatic failover
Asynchronous commit
manual failover

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Multi-region distributed availability group
Availability Zone 1
Private subnet
AWS Region A
Availability Zone 2
Private subnet
Amazon
EC2
primary
replica
Amazon EC2
secondary
replica
Synchronous commit
automatic failover
Availability Zone 1
Private subnet
AWS Region B
Availability Zone 2
Private subnet
Amazon
EC2
primary
replica
Amazon EC2
secondary
replica
Synchronous commit
automatic failover
VPC
peering
Asynchronous commit
manual failover

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Multi-AZ failover cluster instance
Amazon EBS Amazon EBS
Availability Zone 1
Private subnet
Availability Zone 2
Private subnet
AWS Region
Amazon
EC2
primary
replica
Amazon EC2
secondary
replica
Data replication

31. Veronika – Sonos

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Sonos
Sonos is the easy-to-use
wireless home sound
system

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It’s hard
“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means
effort, pain, difficulty …”
– Theodore Roosevelt

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“When in AWS, do like the ‘AWSans’”

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SQL Server
Witness
(B)AG
Failover cluster
Log shipping
Tran logs
SQL Server bottlenecks are generally
memory and I/O
“Relying on servers not to crash is called
luck, not a DR strategy.”
– Unknown Test backup
restores/run DBCC

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First attempt
R3.* Amazon EC2 type
• Provisioned IOPs Amazon EBS
for data
• Z drive (instance store) for
TempDB
• AG with SQL Enterprise
What we’ve learned
• Expensive
• IOPs matter
• Amazon EBS optimization throughput
• AWS IAM role for Amazon S3
• Tight security groups
Test, learn, and iterate

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Ephe … Epheme … instance store
• I3.*
• Pros:
• Faster
• Cheaper (1/3 cost: I3.4xl vs R3.4XL
with 40K EBS)
• Cons:
• Instance store is gone on
stop/start (not reboot)
• Other cool stuff
• SQL Server 2016 Standard sp1 BAG
• Core optimized

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Current setup
• I3.*
• SQL Server 2016 sp1 +
• (B)AG
• SQL installed on C: drive
• TempDB and user DBs on
ephemeral
• Near 0 latency
Witness
(B)AG
Amazon S3
Restore/DBCC daily

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Demo summary
R MB/s R IOPs R avg
Lat
W MB/s W IOPs W avg
Lat
R4 I3 R4 I3 R4 I3 R4 I3 R4 I3 R4 I3
Rand 8K 101 947 12975 121148 2.4 0.3 101 381 12974 48822 2.5 0.6
Rand 64K 101 957 1622 15310 20 2.1 101 381 1622 6102 20 5.2
Rand 512K 101 953 202 1907 158 16.8 101 381 405 1526 79 20.1
Seq 8K 101 381 12975 48822 2.5 0.7
Seq 64K 101 381 1621 6102 20 5.2
• I3.xl vs R4.xl (1 TB 20K IO1 Amazon EBS)
• Quicker reads, quicker writes, low latency
• Diskspd
• -t4 (threads), -o8 (Outstanding Request), -d120 (2 min), 20 GB file

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Other configurations
• I3.*
• AG both ENT and STD
• Archive/barely used DBs on GP2 Amazon EBS volumes
• Core optimization (disable hyper-threading/disable cores)
• Distributor
• M3.* with reserved IOPs drives for distribution DB
• SSAS
• X1E.*
• Amazon S3 for backups
• We manage deletes (not through Amazon S3 lifecycle policy)

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Test, learn, and iterate
• IOPS and throughput
• Core optimization
• Security
• HA/DR
• Backups

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Future
“Once you achieve one goal, you should be looking forward to trying to build
onto the next thing, and not just getting comfortable with what you're doing.”
– LL Cool J

43. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Veronika Durgin

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Tips and tricks for Amazon EC2
• Test, test, test!
• High availability for production workloads
• All databases on same primary node in AlwaysOn
• Dedicated ENI for replication traffic
• Backups, audit logs to Amazon S3
• Nightly backups, incremental log backups for PITR
• Storage backups vs. SQL Server backups
• Newer instance types are generally faster and cheaper

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Multi-AZ SQL Server on Amazon RDS
Availability Zone 1
Private subnet
Availability Zone 2
AWS Region
Amazon
RDS
primary
Amazon
RDS
secondary
Private subnet
Automatic failover

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Multi-AZ SQL Server on Amazon RDS
Availability Zone 1
Private Subnet
Availability Zone 2
AWS Region
Amazon
RDS
Primary
Amazon
RDS
Secondary
Private Subnet
Automatic FailoverManaged service

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Tips and tricks – Amazon RDS
• Test, test, test!
• High availability for production workloads
• All databases on same primary node in AlwaysOn
• Dedicated ENI for replication traffic
• Backups, audit logs to Amazon S3
• Nightly backups, incremental log backups for PITR
• Storage backups vs. SQL Server backups
• Newer instance types are generally faster and cheaper
• Amazon RDS has hundreds of thousands of customers, use that learning to
continually improve

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Migrating SQL Server to AWS
Amazon
EC2
Amazon
EBS
Amazon
RDS

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Simple backup/restore migrations
Amazon RDS
Amazon EC2

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What are AWS DMS and AWS SCT?
AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) easily and securely
migrates and/or replicates your databases and data warehouses to
AWS
AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT) converts your commercial
database and data warehouse schemas to open-source engines or AWS-
native services, such as Amazon Aurora and Amazon Redshift
Over 90,000 database instances migrated and counting …

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When to use AWS DMS and AWS SCT?
Modernize Migrate Replicate
Modernize your database tier –
• Commercial to open source
• Commercial to Amazon Aurora
Modernize your data warehouse –
• Commercial to Amazon Redshift
• Migrate business-critical applications
• Migrate from Classic to VPC
• Migrate data warehouse to Amazon Redshift
• Upgrade to a minor version
• Consolidate shards into Aurora
• Create cross-region read replicas
• Run your analytics in the cloud
• Keep your dev/test and production
environment in sync

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Monitoring SQL Server performance
Monitor performance using Amazon CloudWatch
Alarms & notifications: Amazon RDS & Amazon
EC2
Default metrics: Amazon RDS & Amazon EC2
Custom metrics: Amazon EC2
1
2
3
CPU utilization
Read/write IOPS
Disk queue depth
Memory (RDS)
Storage space (RDS)
Connections (RDS)
I/O throughput (EC2)
…
Use Extended Events (SQL Server Profiler) & Tuning Advisor to trace query
performance
Database log files: Amazon RDS & Amazon EC24

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In-depth monitoring
Amazon RDS enhanced monitoring
• OS level monitoring metrics – 26
system and per-process metrics
• Metrics delivered to Amazon
CloudWatch Logs
• Up to 1-second granularity
Amazon EC2 unified CloudWatch agent
• OS level monitoring metrics – 80+
system and per-process metrics
• Metrics delivered to CloudWatch
Logs
Compared to CloudWatch metrics:
• Agent-based metrics collections
• There can be differences with CloudWatch metrics due to collection source
(hypervisor vs. agent) – for example, CPU

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Security and compliance

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Database security
AWS manages Customer manages
• Physical infrastructure controls
• Host access (Amazon RDS)
• Operating system version/patches
(Amazon RDS)
• How database patches are applied
(Amazon RDS)
• Database users and privileges
(Windows Authentication)
• Access to data (TDE, Always
Encrypted)
• SQL audit
• Network controls (VPC security
groups)

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Encryption
App
servers
Storage
• At rest
• Transparent data encryption
• Amazon EBS storage
encryption
• In transit – SSL
• Force SSL for all connections
• Per-connection SSL

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Auditing
AWS API auditing (CloudTrail) Database auditing
• Audit user API calls (Create-,
Modify-, DeleteDBInstance)
• Integrates with Cloudwatch Logs
and CloudWatch Events
• Stored in Amazon S3
• Server-level or database-level audits
• Retention managed by customer
• Logs stored on where you want them
(on host, Amazon S3)

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Compliance
•Assurance programs for finance, healthcare,
government, & more
•Shared responsibility model
•AWS → Security of the cloud
•Customer → Security in the cloud
•https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/

59. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Wojtek Piaseczny
wojtekp@amazon.com
Veronika Durgin
Veronika.Durgin@sonos.com

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