Jaan Paljasma | Tech Blog

Amazon Web Services announced General Availability of second-gen Standard instances (M3) in Amazon RDS, making RDS even better with almost 50% more computing power thanks to new hardware architecture (Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPU) and about 6% lower cost. In my previous post I wrote how did I upgrade db.m1.large to 1000IOPS which resulted single-digit ms MySQL read latency  - that was pretty nice surprise. This time I've decided to take advantage of faster CPU and lower cost offered by db.m3.large instance type. I was pretty aware that m3.large instance type is not EBS optimized (only db.m3.xlarge and above is) and was ready for performance drop, luckily it never happened - charts read the same except CPU load which seems to have dropped ~ 10%. Because I had multi-AZ RDS setup, the failover took ~ 30 seconds and upgrade was completed in 8 minutes. Nice. Amazon RDS Dashboard My recommendation is to upgrade your db.m1 instance type to db.m3 as soon as you can - not only you will

High-performance, provisioned IOPS storage was available in Amazon RDS for more than a year ago, as you can read from AWS article published on 9/25/2012. Recently our MySQL database has grown and contains more than 200 databases, with some of them containing millions of rows (and growing rapidly). Our Multi-AZ RDS instance is db.m1.large which provides pretty decent performance even when it is not EBS optimized. Squeezing more performance was one of my goals when decided to take the road to enable IOPS. You can start from 1000 IOPS with 1000 IOPS increments. I decided to go with 1000 for a start. Process for upgrading Multi-AZ instance is far from complicated - after making your selections through the dashboard UI and deciding to apply changes immediately, instance performs automated fail-over which minimizes the downtime for merely minute or so until DNS reacts to changes. Total upgrade took about 5 hours but system was never down and I did not notice any slowness. Once done,