Some considerations for running SQL Server in Amazon Web Services SQL in AWS Some considerations for running SQL Server in Amazon Web Services

Who Am I? Manager, DBA @ ChannelAdvisor Microsoft Certified Master Eight years working with SQL Server Twitter: @briancarrig Email: briancarrig@gmail.com 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Agenda Background Expectations AWS options Migration strategy HA and DR Monitoring Licensing Learnings 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Project Background Acquired EU based company Legal requirement for data not to leave EU region Good in-house AWS knowledge 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Session Expectations No pro/anti public cloud agenda No AWS vs Azure dogma Not a how-to guide for RDS/EC2 Make informed AWS decisions Understand workload suitability Help make SQL perform in AWS Caveats 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Options for SQL Server in AWS EC2 instances Analogous to VMs in private cloud Remember NOT your infrastructure “Right-sizing” even more important than private cloud VMs RDS instances Analogous to VMs where someone else is sysadmin Backups, patching and HA are managed for you You still need to do everything else 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

RDS Limitations 30 user databases Limited system database access Maximum storage size of 4TB Limited instance types and editions 2016 BYOL (M4 & T2 only) 2016 LI (R3 only) Most server-level roles/permissions No timezone changes or restores between timezones Five minute interval restore granularity Stretch, linked servers, BPE, Polybase, CDC, replication, AGs, server-level triggers, endpoints, FILESTREAM, audit, PBM, instant file-initialization, BULK ops, Database Mail, Maintenance Plans SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, MDS etc. 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Good workload candidates for AWS Experienced AWS team Instance sizing makes sense Instance capacity growth predictable New or trial product Data has geographic restrictions ISV and other “half-managed” instances “Bursty” or 8x5 type workloads Running SQL Express (RDS) 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Poor workload candidates for AWS Capacity growth highly variable Could interfere with HA/DR Instance sizes likely to be a problem High cost sensitivity Well-defined 24x7 workload Liable to generate policy/compliance conflict Enterprise Edition host-based licensing 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Elastic Block Store The SAN of the AWS world 99.999% availability Multiple Availability Zones automatically Snapshots Access management Encryption Newest instances have large increases in throughput Recommend striping multiple volumes for increased throughput General Purpose or Provisioned IOPs 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

AWS EC2 Instance Types Classes of hardware for hosting VMs An I3 class can run 16 x I3.large 1 x I3.16xlarge Choose the instance type that matches your workload Size according to needs and budget 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

AWS Instance Types * Not including P2, G2, D2, F1 instance types Class Assumed Usage Minimum Size Maximum Size Cost (per annum) Storage Notes T2 Dev/Test 1 vCPU 512MB 8 vCPU 32GB $72 - $3,837 EBS-only Burstable use M4 General purpose 2 vCPU 8GB 64 vCPU 256GB $1,778 - $56,686 0.45 - 10Gb/s Haswell or Broadwell M3 3.75GB 30GB $1,139 - $9,075 4GB – 160GB Local SSD Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge C4 Compute heavy stuff 36 vCPU 60GB $1,682 - $27,077 0.5 – 4Gb/s Haswell C3 32 vCPU $1,647- $26,350 32GB – 640GB SSD Ivy Bridge * Not including P2, G2, D2, F1 instance types 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

AWS Instance Types Class Assumed Usage Minimum Size Maximum Size Cost (per annum) Storage Notes X1 Serious stuff 64 vCPU 976GB 128 vCPU 1952GB $84,210 - $168,420 1.92TB – 3.84TB SSD Haswell 5 – 10Gb/s EBS R4 Database usage 2 vCPU 15.25GB 488GB $1,971 - $63,072 EBS-only ~10 - 20Gb/s Broadwell R3 32 vCPU 244GB $2,549 - $30,660 32GB – 640GB Local SSD Ivy Bridge I2 4 vCPU 30.5GB $8,523 – $68,170 800 – 6.4TB SSD I3 $2,172 - $69,519 475GB – 15.25TB NVMe SSD Sandy bridge, ivy bridge, haswell, Broadwell X1 with license included is $588,900 (perpetual licensing would run you $450k). X1 on Linux is $116k per year. Willing to pay $52k a year for windows OS? I2 no longer available in a lot of regions D2 pricing $6k (6TB) - $48,355 (48TB) (same sizing as i2) 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Dedicated hosts and instances Dedicated instances AWS guarantees that your instances will never share workload with a different customer Useful for security/compliance Dedicated hosts Amazon gives you a whole host to run their instance types on Useful for licensing (e.g. Windows OS BYOL) VMWare on AWS ESXi runs on bare metal (I3 class hardware) Useful for management/instance sizing 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Migrating to AWS Understand your data and your workload What are your highest wait types? Decide your instance types Cost Performance Flexibility Know TPS, IOPs, storage latency and throughput expectations Getting there is much like any “moving to a new CoLo” challenge DBATools.io AWS Schema Migration assistant Azure SQL Database Migration Wizard (SQLAzureMW) BCP Log shipping, mirroring, availability groups etc. 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

High Availability in AWS RDS HA based on mirroring AWS endpoint gets a new IP on failover Set low DNS cache for client EC2 No FCI or SAN-based replication Availability Groups Mirroring Log shipping Multi-AZ means multi-subnet clustering 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Disaster Recovery in AWS RDS Export backups to S3 (can replicate to any region) Replicate snapshots to another region Snapshot restore times depend on transaction log activity EC2 Backup to local drive then export to S3 EBS volume snapshots may not be practical Asynchronous AG to another region 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Monitoring SQL in AWS Use your own (may have RDS limitations) Cloudwatch Existing or custom metrics Useful for RDS Detailed monitoring (1 minute granularity) CloudTrail Log API calls to S3 for compliance, auditing 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Licensing SQL in AWS BYOL possible for RDS and EC2 Need to inform MS within 10 days Needs SA for “license mobility” Can use dedicated instances without SA Host licensing available with dedicated hosts License included options for RDS and EC2 For EC2 must use AWS AMI RDS supports 2008 R2 through 2016 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Learnings Possible to allocate multiple private elastic IPs to adapter If using EC2 instances leverage private AMIs Windows Auth on RDS needs AWS Active Directory Service Put SQL in it’s own VPC and security group Be prepared for some AD “quirkiness” New features are released frequently (usually right after you need them) 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Summary It is possible to run SQL successfully in AWS Plan carefully follow guidelines and benchmark and baseline your workload Remember you do not own the infrastructure Leverage benefits of tooling, multiple DCs, multiple regions and have fun * Elastic EBS volumes 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS

Questions? 11/11/201811/11/2018 | SQL in AWS