AWS RDS vs Azure vs Managed Services for SQL Server

We are evaluating pros and cons of different hosting solutions for SQL Server which best suits our business needs.

Our business needs

Our demand is very predictable seasonal demand. We are very small and can’t afford dedicated team for managing database infrastructure.( No DBA Team) Sky high expectation from Customers on availability and reliability for about 2 months in a year. Few minutes of downtown during peak period can cause havoc to our business . Fixed budget with very little wiggle room.   Our plan is to evaluate AWS SQL Server RDS, Azure RDS , Managed solutions from hosting provider. Evaluate each option in these categories.

  1. Performance and Reliability
  2. Ability to scale up during peak loads
  3. Cost ( Based on Network , Storage, Memory and CPU )
  4. Operations Efficiency
  5. Compliance
Infrastructure Requirements :

SQL Server Enterprise Edition since we use enterprise features AlwaysOn Availability group for High Availability Geo Replication or Multi Availability zone implementation for Cloud based databases Ability to route Read/Write workloads 128 Gig RAM – Minimum 1 – 2 TB Storage with 500 Gigs of SSD for TempDB Database and High Volume Tables Memory Optimized OLTP Support which needs SQL Server 2016 Edition Ability to handle ~ 30 K IOPS during peak load.

Amazon AWS SQL Server RDS

RDS Pricing Link  AWS SQL Server RDS Pricing http://www.ec2instances.info/rds/?selected=db.r3.8xlarge

Enterprise Edition  Single-AZ Deployment
 Price Per Hour
Memory Optimized Instances – Current Generation
db.r3.2xlarge$5.810
db.r3.4xlarge$11.404
db.r3.8xlarge$19.271

 

Multi-AZ Deployment
 Price Per Hour
Memory Optimized Instances – Current Generation
db.r3.2xlarge$11.620
db.r3.4xlarge$22.808
db.r3.8xlarge$38.542

AWS SQL Server RDS Configurations On-Demand for SQL Server (License Included) Multi-AZ Deployment Region:  US East (N. Virginia) Memory Optimized Instances – Current Generation Price Per Hour RAM : 244 GB 10 Gigabit 32 vCPU 20,000 Provisioned IOPS  

db.r3.8xlarge244 GB2 x 320 SSDIntel Xeon E5-2670 v2 (Ivy Bridge)32 vCPUs10 Gigabit

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/sqlserver/pricing/
Azure Pricing Calculator

Azure performance is measured in DTU. We have been collecting our performance metrics during load test. The following link provides lightweight utility to convert perfmon counters to Azure DTU’s.

Perfmon to Azure DTU calculator

Understanding DTUs Based on Microsoft definition :https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/sql-database-service-tiers/  

The Database Transaction Unit (DTU) is the unit of measure in SQL Database that represents the relative power of databases based on a real-world measure: the database transaction. We took a set of operations that are typical for an online transaction processing (OLTP) request, and then measured how many transactions could be completed per second under fully loaded.

 : Azure RDS Pricing Calculator
Azure SQL Server Pricing Calculator
Azure Options for SQL Server
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/sql-database/
Basic
eDTUs PER POOLMAX STORAGE PER POOL 1MAX DBs PER POOLMAX eDTUs PER DATABASEPRICE 2
10010 GB2005~$149/mo
20020 GB4005~$298/mo
40039 GB4005~$595/mo
80078 GB4005~$1,198/mo
1200117 GB4005~$1,800/mo
Standard
eDTUs PER POOLMAX STORAGE PER POOL 1MAX DBs PER POOLMAX eDTUs PER DATABASEPRICE 2
100100 GB200100~$223/mo
200200 GB400100~$446/mo
400400 GB400100~$900/mo
800800 GB400100~$1,800/mo
12001.2 TB400100~$2,701/mo
Premium
eDTUs PER POOLMAX STORAGE PER POOL 1MAX DBs PER POOLMAX eDTUs PER DATABASEPRICE 2
125250 GB50125~$697/mo
250500 GB50250~$1,399/mo
500750 GB50500~$2,790/mo
1000750 GB501000~$5,580/mo
1500750 GB501000~$8,370/mo

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      Chennai One IT SEZ,

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