Level 100: Migrating AWS RDS Databases to Graviton

Authors

  • Jeff Forrest, Senior Solutions Architect.

Introduction

AWS Graviton processors are custom custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores.

AWS Graviton CPUs have excellent energy efficiency, switching to Graviton EC2 instances can reduce energy usage by as much as 60% for the same performance as comparable x86-64 instances.

AWS control the end to end lifecycle of the chip, from design to consumption, enhancing overall efficiency. Read more here .

RDS on Graviton

  • Up to 35% faster than non-Graviton.
  • Up to 53% better price/performance than non-Graviton.
  • Almost zero effort migration from x86-64.
  • Supported for RDS databases MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and for Amazon Aurora.
  • Not currently supported for commercial databases Oracle and SQL Server.

Running your database on AWS Graviton is only one way of improving sustainability for RDS, for other options see this blog post .

Goals

At the end of this lab you will:

  • Understand which RDS databases can be migrated from x86-64 to Graviton.
  • Understand the different migration options and how they apply to each database type.
  • Have practical hands on experience migrating RDS databases from x86-64 to Graviton.

Prerequisites

  • This lab is designed to run in your own AWS account.
  • It can be run in any region that supports RDS and Graviton but us-east-1 is recommended.

NOTE: You will be billed for any applicable AWS resources used if you complete this lab that are not covered in the AWS Free Tier . When you decide to stop the lab at any point in time, please revisit the clean up instructions at the end so you stop incurring costs.

Steps: