[ramenmeal]

Meanwhile, SQL Server on RDS doesn't support increasing the data allocation. You can't even take a snapshot and restore to a new, larger, RDS instance. Oh and by the way, SQL Server has been "supported" since 2012.

Obviously it's not their focus, but this is a fundamental selling point to cloud DB's.

[brazzledazzle]

That's pretty lame. Do you happen to know if you can you create an AAG with a larger volume on the replica and cut it over? I don't even remember if that's possible with your own SQL Server AAG, it's been a while. At any rate, thanks for commenting about this. I'm going to need to look into this at some point in the near future so your timing was fortuitous.

[philliphaydon]

We had this issue. Luckily they recently added native backups to s3 so we had 3 hours of downtime to backup a 180gb db and restore to a new 500gb instance.

[brazzledazzle]

Jesus. I'm no strategy genius but sometimes it seems like they want to cede the Windows market to Azure. Some of the Windows stuff in AWS seems kind of "me too".

[brianwawok]

Is the windows server market with fighting for? Ms makes the most profit no matter who runs the hardware.

[brazzledazzle]

That's a fair point. And if it really came down to it they could (and arguably do with things like SQL server) make the licensing terms less agreeable for other cloud operators.

[ramenmeal]

In short, I don't know. However, I highly doubt it. Most of these features/permissions are disabled when you use RDS. For example you can't take a snapshot through SSMS, you have to use the AWS console.

[dorfsmay]

I'm assuming MS SQL? Isn't much cheaper to run it on an instance yourself if you have company licenses? And I suspect people who don't already have licenses run postgres or mysql.

[brazzledazzle]

Yep, MS SQL Server. I think that's something you have to determine on a case-by-case basis. If you have Software Assurance you can run it on any instance but if you don't you have to pay Amazon for dedicated hardware. As usual Microsoft's enterprise licensing is pretty much shit. You might also incur more operations overhead than you can afford by having to deal with patching, outages, performance degradation, etc. And your management might want to engage in a slide deck circle jerk with animations about how modern and in the cloud you are by using RDS so that's worth throwing a few $30K+SA enterprise proc licenses away.