Is it time to move from SQL Azure to Amazon RDS SQL Server?

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Is it time to move from SQL Azure to Amazon RDS SQL Server?

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Jeremiah Peschka SSChasing Mays Points: 640 More actions · Answer 1

Peter Marriott (7/13/2012)The testing will be doing is to see, for a particular client's application, what level of Amazon EC2 and RDS is needed to out perform Azure. At that point I'll check out the relative costs and make some recommendations.

The other thing you'll find is that the standard instances only have a 1GbE connection to storage and the CC instances, while they have a 10GbE card in them, do not have a 10GbE connection to EBS. It's more along the lines of 4GbE. You'll see about 100 IOPS per EBS volume and it can burst to ~600 IOPS from time to time. Azure is a lot more automatic whereas AWS requires that you think about your storage and RDS doesn't give you much of an option at all apart from allocate a full 1TB volume (which probably isn't a single EBS volume under the covers).

Jeremiah Peschka
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Managing Director - Brent Ozar PLF, LLC

Peter Marriott Mr or Mrs. 500 Points: 528 More actions · Answer 2

Jeremiah Peschka (7/13/2012)
Peter Marriott (7/13/2012)
Yes the Amazon controls are far better than those in Azure, it is just a shame they don't also do encrypted connections.
Where do you need to connect from? There's an encrypted VPN tunnel that you can use.

In production I would use a bastion host. But while in development I am connecting from SSMS on my client and occasionally my application for debugged. I had hoped I could just tick the 'Encrypt connection' box as it were. How would you suggest you could do this with Amazon?

Jeremiah Peschka SSChasing Mays Points: 640 More actions · Answer 3

Peter Marriott (7/13/2012)In production I would use a bastion host. But while in development I am connecting from SSMS on my client and occasionally my application for debugged. I had hoped I could just tick the 'Encrypt connection' box as it were. How would you suggest you could do this with Amazon?

I'd ask what you're trying to accomplish. If you're simply trying to have the warm fuzzy feeling that some people get from encryption and have it managed by Amazon, then you're not going to be happy. SQL Server RDS is a new and fairly basic solution at the moment.

NICs in AWS cannot be placed into promiscuous mode - nobody can employ packet sniffing within AWS. Using security groups means you can restrict traffic to your own IP or subnet and, hopefully, you keep a tight control over who is listening in there.

So... what are you trying to accomplish?

Jeremiah Peschka
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Managing Director - Brent Ozar PLF, LLC

Peter Marriott Mr or Mrs. 500 Points: 528 More actions · Answer 4

Sqlchicken (7/13/2012)
irozenberg (7/10/2012)
G'day. Why you did not even consider an option to move from SQL Azure to WinServer/SQL VM in cloud as part of Microsoft Azure IaaS recent offer (announced in beginning of June).
^^This. This article is essentially apples to oranges comparison as one is IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and other is SaaS (Software as a service). June release of Azure introduced VM hosting which is IaaS. You CAN compare that to Amazon's offering. Azure's SQL Database offering, while yes, limited compared to on-prem version right now, will change dramatically over the course of next few releases. The Azure offerings will eventually be parity (or close to) on-prem. In the end, just do what works for you.

You are quite correct that they aren’t the same animal, however I would still suggest RDS is essentially Amazon's PaaS SQL Server offering, so although closer to IaaS it is the competitor to SQL Azure probably going to be sold as such. It will be interesting to see how both Amazon and Microsoft expand their offerings because neither of them are going to stand still.

Amazon and Microsoft do have one cloud database offering which is directly comparable: SQL Server on Azure IaaS vis SQL Server on EC2.

Peter Marriott Mr or Mrs. 500 Points: 528 More actions · Answer 5

Jeremiah Peschka (7/13/2012)
Peter Marriott (7/13/2012)In production I would use a bastion host. But while in development I am connecting from SSMS on my client and occasionally my application for debugged. I had hoped I could just tick the 'Encrypt connection' box as it were. How would you suggest you could do this with Amazon?
I'd ask what you're trying to accomplish. If you're simply trying to have the warm fuzzy feeling that some people get from encryption and have it managed by Amazon, then you're not going to be happy. SQL Server RDS is a new and fairly basic solution at the moment.
NICs in AWS cannot be placed into promiscuous mode - nobody can employ packet sniffing within AWS. Using security groups means you can restrict traffic to your own IP or subnet and, hopefully, you keep a tight control over who is listening in there.
So... what are you trying to accomplish?

My take is that you can lock AWS down better than you can Azure down. I was just flagging the point about encrypted connections working easily with Azure.

Peter Marriott Mr or Mrs. 500 Points: 528 More actions · Answer 6

Jeremiah Peschka (7/13/2012)
Peter Marriott (7/13/2012)The testing will be doing is to see, for a particular client's application, what level of Amazon EC2 and RDS is needed to out perform Azure. At that point I'll check out the relative costs and make some recommendations.
The other thing you'll find is that the standard instances only have a 1GbE connection to storage and the CC instances, while they have a 10GbE card in them, do not have a 10GbE connection to EBS. It's more along the lines of 4GbE. You'll see about 100 IOPS per EBS volume and it can burst to ~600 IOPS from time to time. Azure is a lot more automatic whereas AWS requires that you think about your storage and RDS doesn't give you much of an option at all apart from allocate a full 1TB volume (which probably isn't a single EBS volume under the covers).

Thank you all information gratefully received. 🙂

Jeremiah Peschka SSChasing Mays Points: 640 More actions · Answer 7

Peter Marriott (7/13/2012) My take is that you can lock AWS down better than you can Azure down. I was just flagging the point about encrypted connections working easily with Azure.

Based on how it looks like encrypted connections are accomplished, it may be a while before it's supported. Almost nothing that hits up the system drive is supported because those changes may not persist across reboots with the current way things are being done. If you do want the feature, though, hit up the RDS forums and make a feature request. The SQL Server RDS team is pretty responsive to feature requests and they really want to know how people are using the product.

Jeremiah Peschka
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Managing Director - Brent Ozar PLF, LLC

alexerwin33444 Newbie Points: 3 More actions · Answer 8

Hi,

Has anyone heard as to when SQL Azure will support Full-Text Search? FTS was a sticking point for my moving a couple of e-com apps to the cloud. Eventually was left with SQL Express on EC2 as I have not yet sought to port over to RDS.

Also I have read a few times that multi-tenant servers in general have the problem with customers running insane resource hog queries and scripts. Shouldn't this factor into a performance consideration?

Thanks

Alex

Jeremiah Peschka SSChasing Mays Points: 640 More actions · Answer 9

alexerwin33444 (7/13/2012)
Eventually was left with SQL Express on EC2 as I have not yet sought to port over to RDS.
Also I have read a few times that multi-tenant servers in general have the problem with customers running insane resource hog queries and scripts. Shouldn't this factor into a performance consideration?
Thanks
Alex

Hi Alex,

I have no idea about Azure feature roadmap, but I do know that Microsoft have very specific Azure throttling guidelines that are publicly available. While both Hyper-V (Azure) and Xen (AWS) allow for CPU overcommit, there is a lot of work that has been done to make sure that other users are not claiming more resources than they are paying for. In my experience this hasn't been a problem, although I think myths have persisted... Either that or I am the resource hog.

Remember that performance is a feature. If you need a specific level of performance you either need to pay for it or else design your application to meet your performance needs. When in doubt: benchmark.

Jeremiah Peschka
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Managing Director - Brent Ozar PLF, LLC

Bad_Karma Default port Points: 1439 More actions · Answer 10

Great article. I never seriously considered Amazon until now, and after looking into it I found one important fact not mentioned here. The free trial!

I imagine that there are a number of people in my shoes who are just thinking about getting their feet wet with the cloud. And there is a huge differnce between the trial that Microsoft and Amazon offers. The trial Microsoft offers is absolutely miniscule and makes doing even a simple proof of concept nearly impossible without costing something. Microsoft offeres something along the lines of 1gb of storage, 1 database, for 1 month. On the other hand, Amazon offers 20Gbs of a single instance (unlimited dbs) for 12, yes 12 months!.

That makes it a simple decision for me on which one to try.