Posted On: Jun 18, 2018

Following on the launch announcement from EC2, we are excited to announce Optimize CPUs for RDS Oracle in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Optimize CPU provides customers greater control of their RDS Oracle instances on two fronts. First, customers can specify a custom number of cores when launching new instances to save on vCPU-based licensing costs. Second, they can disable Intel Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel HT Technology) for workloads that perform well with single-threaded CPUs.

Many customers running Oracle database workloads on RDS today want high memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth, but not a high vCPU count - since these workloads may not be compute-bound. Memory-optimized instance families such as X1, X1e and R4 offer high RAM-to-vCPU ratio to help customers right-size their instances. With Optimize CPUs, customers now have the added flexibility of specifying a custom number of vCPUs, while enjoying the same memory, storage, and bandwidth of a full-sized instance. For example, X1.8xlarge currently offers 32 vCPUs but customers can now launch X1e.8xlarge with 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, or 32 vCPUs to optimize their vCPU-based licensing costs. Bring your own license (BYOL) customers will be able to optimize their BYOL usage and save on license costs. However, CPU optimized instances will have the same price as full-sized EC2 instances of the same size.

We are also offering customers ability to disable Intel HT Technology on RDS Oracle instances. WhileIntel HT Technology is enabled by default on RDS Oracle instance types, certain applications are not designed to benefit from Intel HT Technology. Compute intensive workloads experience performance degradation due to context switching when Intel HT Technology is enabled. By disabling Intel HT, customers can fine-tune their application performance, optimize BYOL usage and save on license costs.

Optimize CPUs is now available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD and in all public RDS regions.