From Amazon Web Services, an IOUG Partner
In an age where increased productivity is the gold standard, DBAs continuously seek new ways to become more efficient in their daily work. Amazon Web Services (AWS), an IOUG partner, recognizes this need and recently announced two new features to reduce and optimize vCPUs on the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle Database.
These new features for Amazon RDS come as a result of customer feedback and requests for product enhancement. One instance of feedback suggested enterprises that run Oracle workloads could “enhance the value of their software licenses by keeping the RAM per physical core ratio significantly higher than what is offered on Amazon RDS for Oracle,” according to an announcement from AWS.
AWS also found that customers were working with databases that often required additional memory with very few or no CPUs required to sustain the growth of the workload. Because of this, users were over-provisioning their CPUs to get more memory, which ultimately resulted in additional licensing costs.
With these two pieces of feedback in mind, AWS released the following new features:
- Support for X1 and X1e instances in Amazon RDS for Oracle: Allows Oracle customers to maximize the value of their Oracle licenses by increasing memory without increasing processor license counts, as the X1 and X1e instances offer the highest ratio of memory to vCPU among current Amazon EC2 instance types.
- Optimize CPU in Amazon RDS: Allows customers to specify a custom number of vCPUs when launching new RDS Oracle instances, to optimize their vCPU-based licensing spend. Customers can also optionally disable hyperthreading to fine tune their application performance.