Tag Archives: Thought Leadership

Better performance for less: AWS continues to beat Azure on SQL Server price/performance

Post Syndicated from Fred Wurden original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/sql-server-runs-better-on-aws/

By Fred Wurden, General Manager, AWS Enterprise Engineering (Windows, VMware, RedHat, SAP, Benchmarking)

AWS R5b.8xlarge delivers better performance at lower cost than Azure E64_32s_v4 for a SQL Server workload

In this blog, we will review a recent benchmark that Principled Technologies published on 2/25. The benchmark found that an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R5b.8xlarge instance delivered better performance for a SQL Server workload at a lower cost when directly tested against an Azure E64_32s_v4 VM.

Behind the study: Understanding how SQL Server performed better, for a lower cost with an AWS EC2 R5b instance

Principled Technologies tested an online transaction processing (OLTP) workload for SQL Server 2019 on both an R5b instance on Amazon EC2 with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) as storage and Azure E64_32s_v4. This particular Azure VM was chosen as an equivalent to the R5b instance, as both instances have comparable specifications for input/output operations per second (IOPS) performance, use Intel Xeon processors from the same generation (Cascade Lake), and offer the same number of cores (32). For storage, Principled Technologies mirrored storage configurations across the Azure VM and the EC2 instance (which used Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)), maxing out the IOPS specs on each while offering a direct comparison between instances.

Test Configurations

Source: Principled Technologies

When benchmarking, Principled Technologies ran a TPC-C-like OLTP workload from HammerDB v3.3 on both instances, testing against new orders per minute (NOPM) performance. NOPM shows the number of new-order transactions completed in one minute as part of a serialized business workload. HammerDB claims that because NOPM is “independent of any particular database implementation [it] is the recommended primary metric to use.”

The results: SQL Server on AWS EC2 R5b delivered 2x performance than the Azure VM and 62% less expensive 

Graphs that show AWS instance outperformed the Azure instance

Source: Principled Technologies

These test results from the Principled Technologies report show the price/performance and performance comparisons. The performance metric is New Orders Per Minute (NOPM); faster is better. The price/performance calculations are based on the cost of on-demand, License Included SQL Server instances and storage to achieve 1,000 NOPM performance, smaller is better.

An EC2 r5b.8xlarge instance powered by an Intel Xeon Scalable processor delivered better SQL Server NOPM performance on the HammerDB benchmark and a lower price per 1,000 NOPM than an Azure E64_32s_v4 VM powered by similar Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

On top of that, AWS’s storage price-performance exceeded Azure’s. The Azure managed disks offered 53 percent more storage than the EBS storage, but the EC2 instance with EBS storage cost 24 percent less than the Azure VM with managed disks. Even by reducing Azure storage by the difference in storage, something customers cannot do, EBS would have cost 13 percent less per storage GB than the Azure managed disks.

Why AWS is the best cloud to run your Windows and SQL Server workloads

To us, these results aren’t surprising. In fact, they’re in line with the success that customers find running Windows on AWS for over 12 years. Customers like Pearson and Expedia have all found better performance and enhanced cost savings by moving their Windows, SQL Server, and .NET workloads to AWS. In fact, RepricerExpress migrated its Windows and SQL Server environments from Azure to AWS to slash outbound bandwidth costs while gaining agility and performance.

Not only do we offer better price-performance for your Windows workloads, but we also offer better ways to run Windows in the cloud. Whether you want to rehost your databases to EC2, move to managed with Amazon Relational Database for SQL Server (RDS), or even modernize to cloud-native databases, AWS stands ready to help you get the most out of the cloud.

 

To learn more on migrating Windows Server or SQL Server, visit Windows on AWS. For more stories about customers who have successfully migrated and modernized SQL Server workloads with AWS, visit our Customer Success page. Contact us to start your migration journey today.

Extending SaaS products with serverless functions

Post Syndicated from James Beswick original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/extending-saas-products-with-serverless-functions/

This post was written by Santiago Cardenas, Sr Partner SA. and Nir Mashkowski, Principal Product Manager.

Increasingly, customers turn to software as a service (SaaS) solutions for the potential of lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO). This enables customers to focus their teams on business priorities instead of managing and maintaining software and infrastructure. Startups are building SaaS products for a wide variety of common application types to take advantage of these market needs.

As SaaS accelerates adoption, enterprise customers expect the same capabilities that are available with traditional, on-premises software. They want the ability to customize system behavior and use rich integrations that can help build solutions rapidly.

For customization and extensibility, many independent software vendors (ISVs) are building application programming interfaces (APIs) and integration hooks. To extend these capabilities, many SaaS builders expose a common set of APIs:

  • Event APIs emit events when SaaS entities change. Synchronous event APIs block the SaaS action until the API completes a request. Asynchronous are non-blocking and use mechanisms like pub/sub and webhooks to inform the caller of updates. Event APIs are used for many purposes, such as enriching incoming data or triggering workflows.
  • CRUD APIs allow developers to interact with entities within the SaaS product. They can be used by mobile or web clients to add, update, and remove records, for example.
  • Schema APIs allow developers to create data entities in the SaaS product, such as tables, key-value stores, or document repositories.
  • User experience (UX) components. Many SaaS products include an SDK that helps provide a consistent look-and-feel and built-in support for common functions, such as authentication. Components are sometimes delivered as code libraries or as an online API that renders the UI.

Business systems expose different subsets of the APIs based on the application domain. Extensibility models are built on top of those APIs and can take various different forms. ISVs use these APIs to build features such as “no code” workflow engines, UX, and report generators. In those cases, the SaaS product runs a domain-specific language (DSL) where it controls compute, storage, and memory consumption.

Figure 1: Example of various APIs providing extensibility within a SaaS app

This level of customization is acceptable for many business users. However, for more sophisticated customization, this requires the ability to write custom code. When coding is needed, some business systems choose to provide sandboxing for the user code within the service. Others choose to ask developers to host the extensibility model themselves.

The growth of vendor-hosted SaaS extensions

First-generation SaaS products essentially “lift and shift” on-premises enterprise software, where each customer has a copy of the entire stack. This single tenant model offers simplicity, a smaller blast radius, and faster time to market.

Newer, born-in-the-cloud SaaS products implement a multi-tenant approach, where all resources are shared across customers. This model may be easier to maintain but can present challenges for handling security, isolation, and resource allocation.

Multi-tenancy challenges are harder when customers can run custom code inside the SaaS infrastructure. To solve this, SaaS builders may start with a customer hosted approach, where customers implement their own extensions by consuming SaaS APIs. This means customers must learn and install an SDK, deploy, and maintain an app in their cloud. This often results in higher cost and slower time to market.

To simplify this model, SaaS builders are finding ways to allow developers to write code directly within the SaaS product. The event driven, pay-per-execution, and polyglot nature of serverless functions provides new capabilities for implementing SaaS extensibility. This model is called vendor hosted SaaS extensions.

SaaS builders are using AWS Lambda for serverless functions to provide flexible compute options to their customers. The goal is to abstract away and simplify the consumption model. AWS provides SaaS builders with features and controls to customize the execution environments as part of their own SaaS product. This allows SaaS owners more flexibility when deciding on isolation models, usability, and cost considerations.

Isolating tenant requests

Isolation of customer requests is important both at the product level and at the tenant level. Product-level isolation focuses on controlling and enforcing the access to data between tenants. It ensures that one tenant is separated from another tenant’s functions. Tenant-level isolation focuses on resources allocated to serve requests. These may include identity, network and internet access, file system access, and memory/CPU allocation.

Figure 2: Example of hierarchical levels of abstraction

Usability

SaaS product owners can allow customers to use familiar programming languages within the serverless functions. This allows customers to grow with the service and potentially host and scale independently, using their own infrastructure.

Usability considers the domain and industry of the product. For example, if the SaaS product enables data processing, it may enable invocation of serverless functions during these workflows. Additionally, these functions may provide the customer the context of the user, application, tenant, and the domain. A streamlined, opinionated deployment workflow that abstracts away initial configuration can also aid customer adoption.

Managing costs

Cost is an important factor in driving adoption. It’s an important differentiator to pay only for the resources used, while being able to scale in response to events. This can help reduce costs that are passed on to SaaS customers.

Examples of SaaS product extensibility

Multiple AWS Partners are extending their SaaS product using Lambda for on-demand scalable compute. This enables them to focus on enriching the customer experience that is associated with their business domain. Examples include:

  • Segment Functions, which seamlessly integrates as a source or destination. The service uses code snippets to allow customers to enrich data, enforce consistency, and connect to APIs and services that power their workflows.
  • Freshworks’ Neo platform provides extensibility using the concept of apps. These are powered by Lambda functions hosting the core business logic and backends. Apps are triggered by unplanned and scheduled Freshworks events (customer support tickets, IT service cases, contacts, and deal updates), in addition to app-specific and external events.
  • Netlify Functions enables customers to supercharge frontend code with functions in their development workflow. These can power automated triggers, connect to third-party APIs, or provide user authentication.

All of these SaaS partners abstract away the deployment, versioning, and configuration of custom code using Lambda.

Conclusion

As customers increasingly use SaaS solutions in their businesses, they want the same customization and extensibility available in on-premises solutions. SaaS partners have developed APIs and integration hooks to help address this need. For more sophisticated customization, products enable custom code to run within their SaaS workflows.

This presents SaaS partners with isolation, usability, and cost challenges and many of them are now using serverless functions to address these challenges. Lambda provides a pay-per-value compute service that scales automatically to meet customer demand. Segment Functions, Freshworks, and Netlify Functions have all used Lambda to provide extensibility to their customers.

Lambda continues to develop features and functionality to power the extensibility of SaaS products. We look forward to seeing the new ways you use Lambda to extend your SaaS product for your customers. Share your Lambda extensibility story with us at [email protected].

For more serverless learning resources, visit Serverless Land.

Learn why AWS is the best cloud to run Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server workloads

Post Syndicated from Fred Wurden original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/learn-why-aws-is-the-best-cloud-to-run-microsoft-windows-server-and-sql-server-workloads/

Fred Wurden, General Manager, AWS Enterprise Engineering (Windows, VMware, RedHat, SAP, Benchmarking)

For companies that rely on Windows Server but find it daunting to move those workloads to the cloud, there is no easier way to run Windows in the cloud than AWS. Customers as diverse as Expedia, Pearson, Seven West Media, and RepricerExpress have chosen AWS over other cloud providers to unlock the Microsoft products they currently rely on, including Windows Server and SQL Server. The reasons are several: by embracing AWS, they’ve achieved cost savings through forthright pricing options and expanded breadth and depth of capabilities. In this blog, we break down these advantages to understand why AWS is the simplest, most popular and secure cloud to run your business-critical Windows Server and SQL Server workloads.

AWS lowers costs and increases choice with flexible pricing options

Customers expect accurate and transparent pricing so you can make the best decisions for your business. When assessing which cloud to run your Windows workloads, customers look at the total cost of ownership (TCO) of workloads.

Not only does AWS provide cost-effective ways to run Windows and SQL Server workloads, we also regularly lower prices to make it even more affordable. Since launching in 2006, AWS has reduced prices 85 times. In fact, we recently dropped pricing by and average of 25% for Amazon RDS for SQL Server Enterprise Edition database instances in the Multi-AZ configuration, for both On-Demand Instance and Reserved Instance types on the latest generation hardware.

The AWS pricing approach makes it simple to understand your costs, even as we actively help you pay AWS less now and in the future. For example, AWS Trusted Advisor provides real-time guidance to provision your resources more efficiently. This means that you spend less money with us. We do this because we know that if we aren’t creating more and more value for you each year, you’ll go elsewhere.

In addition, we have several other industry-leading initiatives to help lower customer costs, including AWS Compute Optimizer, Amazon CodeGuru, and AWS Windows Optimization and Licensing Assessments (AWS OLA). AWS Compute Optimizer recommends optimal AWS Compute resources for your workloads by using machine learning (ML) to analyze historical utilization metrics. Customers who use Compute Optimizer can save up to 25% on applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Machine learning also plays a key role in Amazon CodeGuru, which provides intelligent recommendations for improving code quality and identifying an application’s most expensive lines of code. Finally, AWS OLA helps customers to optimize licensing and infrastructure provisioning based on actual resource consumption (ARC) to offer cost-effective Windows deployment options.

Cloud pricing shouldn’t be complicated

Other cloud providers bury key pricing information when making comparisons to other vendors, thereby incorrectly touting pricing advantages. Often those online “pricing calculators” that purport to clarify pricing neglect to include hidden fees, complicating costs through licensing rules (e.g., you can run this workload “for free” if you pay us elsewhere for “Software Assurance”). At AWS, we believe such pricing and licensing tricks are contrary to the fundamental promise of transparent pricing for cloud computing.

By contrast, AWS makes it straightforward for you to run Windows Server applications where you want. With our End-of-Support Migration Program (EMP) for Windows Server, you can easily move your legacy Windows Server applications—without needing any code changes. The EMP technology decouples the applications from the underlying OS. This enables AWS Partners or AWS Professional Services to migrate critical applications from legacy Windows Server 2003, 2008, and 2008 R2 to newer, supported versions of Windows Server on AWS. This allows you to avoid extra charges for extended support that other cloud providers charge.

Other cloud providers also may limit your ability to Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) for SQL Server to your preferred cloud provider. Meanwhile, AWS improves the BYOL experience using EC2 Dedicated Hosts and AWS License Manager. With EC2 Dedicated Hosts, you can save costs by moving existing Windows Server and SQL Server licenses do not have Software Assurance to AWS. AWS License Manager simplifies how you manage your software licenses from software vendors such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM across AWS and on-premises environments. We also work hard to help our customers spend less.

How AWS helps customers save money on Windows Server and SQL Server workloads

The first way AWS helps customers save money is by delivering the most reliable global cloud infrastructure for your Windows workloads. Any downtime costs customers in terms of lost revenue, diminished customer goodwill, and reduced employee productivity.

With respect to pricing, AWS offers multiple pricing options to help our customers save. First, we offer AWS Savings Plans that provide you with a flexible pricing model to save up to 72 percent on your AWS compute usage. You can sign up for Savings Plans for a 1- or 3-year term. Our Savings Plans help you easily manage your plans by taking advantage of recommendations, performance reporting and budget alerts in AWS Cost Explorer, which is a unique benefit only AWS provides. Not only that, but we also offer Amazon EC2 Spot Instances that help you save up to 90 percent on your compute costs vs. On-Demand Instance pricing.

Customers don’t need to walk this migration path alone. In fact, AWS customers often make the most efficient use of cloud resources by working with assessment partners like Cloudamize, CloudChomp, or Migration Evaluator (formerly TSO Logic), which is now part of AWS. By running detailed assessments of their environments with Migration Evaluator before migration, customers can achieve an average of 36 percent savings using AWS over three years. So how do you get from an on-premises Windows deployment to the cloud? AWS makes it simple.

AWS has support programs and tools to help you migrate to the cloud

Though AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for Windows is a great way to reduce the cost of migrating Windows Server and SQL Server workloads, MAP is more than a cost savings tool. As part of MAP, AWS offers a number of resources to support and sustain your migration efforts. This includes an experienced APN Partner ecosystem to execute migrations, our AWS Professional Services team to provide best practices and prescriptive advice, and a training program to help IT professionals understand and carry out migrations successfully. We help you figure out which workloads to move first, then leverage the combined experience of our Professional Services and partner teams to guide you through the process. For customers who want to save even more (up to 72% in some cases) we are the leaders in helping customers transform legacy systems to modernized managed services.

Again, we are always available to help guide you in your Windows journey to the cloud. We guide you through our technologies like AWS Launch Wizard, which provides a guided way of sizing, configuring, and deploying AWS resources for Microsoft applications like Microsoft SQL Server Always On, or through our comprehensive ecosystem of tens of thousands of partners and third-party solutions, including many with deep expertise with Windows technologies.

Why run Windows Server and SQL Server anywhere else but AWS?

Not only does AWS offer significantly more services than any other cloud, with over 48 services without comparable equivalents on other clouds, but AWS also provides better ways to use Microsoft products than any other cloud. This includes Active Directory as a managed service and FSx for Windows File Server, the only fully managed file storage service for Windows. If you’re interested in learning more about how AWS improves the Windows experience, please visit this article on our Modernizing with AWS blog.

Bring your Windows Server and SQL Server workloads to AWS for the most secure, reliable, and performant cloud, providing you with the depth and breadth of capabilities at the lowest cost. To learn more, visit Windows on AWS. Contact us today to learn more on how we can help you move your Windows to AWS or innovate on open source solutions.

About the Author
Fred Wurden is the GM of Enterprise Engineering (Windows, VMware, Red Hat, SAP, benchmarking) working to make AWS the most customer-centric cloud platform on Earth. Prior to AWS, Fred worked at Microsoft for 17 years and held positions, including: EU/DOJ engineering compliance for Windows and Azure, interoperability principles and partner engagements, and open source engineering. He lives with his wife and a few four-legged friends since his kids are all in college now.