New High-Performance Provisioned IOPS Storage for Amazon RDS

Today AWS announced that it is extending the provisioned IOPS concept already available for EBS volumes to RDS instances. So just like with EBS volumes you can now not only provision the storage size associated with an RDS instance, but also the performance of the RDS instance. This is a great improvement for AWS customers who want to run high-performance applications on RDS as they can now pay for the performance they need.

Remember that RDS is a very easy service to leverage from enterprise Java applications because the databases can be made available through a standard JDBC interface. This means that there is absolutely no difference in terms of the Java code when using an RDS hosted MySQL instance, versus a MySQL instance hosted on your own in-house server, or even hosted on an EC2 instance for example.

Here is the official announcement:

We are excited to announce the availability of Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS, a new high-performance storage option for the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server database in the cloud — and now enables you to provision up to 10,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) with 1TB of storage for your new database instances.

Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is optimized for I/O-intensive, transactional (OLTP) database workloads. We are delivering this functionality to you in two stages. Starting immediately, when you create new database instances using the AWS Management Console or the Amazon RDS APIs, you can provision from 1,000 IOPS to 10,000 IOPS with corresponding storage from 100GB to 1TB for MySQL and Oracle databases. If you are using SQL Server then the maximum IOPS you can provision is 7,000 IOPS.

In the near future, we plan to provide you with an automated way to migrate existing database instances to Provisioned IOPS storage for the MySQL and Oracle database engines. If you want to migrate an existing RDS database instance to Provisioned IOPS storage immediately, you can export the data from your existing database instance and import into a new database instance equipped with Provisioned IOPS storage.

Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS can be used with all RDS features like Multi-AZ, Read Replicas, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and with all RDS-supported database engines (MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server). Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is immediately available for new database instances in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), and EU West (Ireland) Regions. We plan to launch in our other AWS Regions in the coming months.