AWS EBS Performance

Here is a very good presentation on Amazon EBS performance from reInvent in 2013:
http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/ebs-webinarfinal

Migrating data from on premise to AWS

Here are some the approximate transfer rates for Amazon Storage Gateway and Riverbed Whitewater:

• Amazon Storage Gateway 5 TB a day
• Riverbed Whitewater  3-5 TB an hour

Keep in mind that using gateways to migrate a relational database is probably not the best option as these mechanism use snapshots.

Other blog entries are here:

Migrating data for migrating to RDS but useful for EC2 based databases as well: http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/10/loading-data-from-on-premise-oracle.html

This blog discusses the time it takes to transfer 1 TB of data over different lines with different transfer speeds: http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/02/oracle-db-data-transfer-to-aws.html

Mechanisms to bulk migrate data: http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/06/bulk-loading-data-to-aws-from-on-premise.html

Here is a blog post on different transfer mechanisms for applications but could be used for databases:http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/04/on-premise-application-replication-and.html

Attunity CloudBeam: http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/12/moving-and-migrating-data-from-on.html

Oracle Database on AWS white paper

This white paper is a great resource for Oracle DBAs and developers:

http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_RDBMS_Oracle.pdf

AWS Storage options, cost, and SLA

A common question when moving from on premise to AWS is what are the storage options
 and how much they will cost.  A great place to calculate the cost is the Simple Monthly Calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html. 

Before you can calculate the cost you need to be aware of the options, cost of each option, when to use it, and SLAs:

a.   EBS: http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/ec2/ : Data Transfer, EBS standard and EBS PIOPS. Sample pricing:

                                                             i.     Data Transfer, EBS Standard, EBS PIOPS : http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/ebs/

                                                            ii.     Price is for allocated storage

                                                          iii.     SLA : annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume

                                                          iv.     Common use cases: RDBMS (PIOPS), Application Server files (IOPS)

b.   S3 : http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/s3/

                                                             i.     First TB per month of storage: .095

                                                            ii.     Data transfer : Up to 10 TB .120 per GB + request prices (.005 per 1K requests)

                                                          iii.     Price is for used storage

                                                          iv.     SLA: 99.999999999% durability, 99.99% availability

                                                           v.     Common use cases: backups, multi media content, web logs, EMR jobs

c.    Glacier: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

                                                             i.     First TB per month of storage: .01

                                                            ii.     Price is for used storage

                                                          iii.     SLA: 99.999999999% durability

                                                          iv.     Common use cases: archiving, long term storage

d.   Instance storage : Included in price of instance

                                                             i.     Common use cases: web server files (instance disk storage), data warehouses (Redshift runs on instance storage), RDBMS (instance SSD..with redundancy), temporary files

Horizontal Scaling of Oracle on AWS

Just came across this solution.
Parelastic: http://www.parelastic.com (MySQL only at this time)

I really enjoyed the 'sharding sucks' mantra.  Being an 'old school' Oracle guy, the new world answer to  database scaling is sharding...I think that is very naive.

I know of these two companies in this space as well:

Scalearc (MySQL and SQL Server)

Scalebase : http://www.scalebase.com (MySQL only at this time)

Copying 1 TB of data from on premise RDBMS to AWS/EC2

I often get asked how long it will take to transmit a 1 TB database (assumes that the database is actually 1 TB in size and not just allocated at 1 TB). Elapsed time is going to depend on many factors: speed of connection, compression used (if any), can load be done in parallel etc.  The fastest load times will happen using AWS import/export (http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/ ).  The next fastest will be using AWS Direct Connect (http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect). Direct Connect provides speeds of 1 Gbps to 10Gbps.  Using a 1 Gbps line, it would take about 3-4 hours (here is a good site: http://fasterdata.es.net/fasterdata-home/requirements-and-expectations/).    Assuming an internet connection speed of 100 Mbps (100Base-T connection) it would take about a day to transfer using a traditional connection to AWS/EC2  Both DirectConnect and Import/export provide a secure method of transfer.