Amazon Web Services Best Practices for Running Oracle Database on AWS

Database Storage
Most users typically use Amazon EBS for database storage. For some very high-
performance architectures, you can use instance storage SSDs, but they should be
augmented with Amazon EBS storage for reliable persistence.

For high and consistent IOPS and database performance, we highly recommend using
General Purpose (GP2) volumes or Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) volumes. GP2 and PIOPS
volumes are available for both Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS.

See the documentation for the latest limits of IOPS per volume for both GP2 and PIOPS
volume types. GP2 volumes provide an excellent balance of price and performance for
most database needs. When your database requires higher IOPS than what GP2 can
provide, PIOPS volumes are the right choice.

For PIOPS volumes, you specify an IOPS rate when you create the volume, and Amazon
EBS delivers within 10% of the Provisioned IOPS performance 99.9% of the time over a
given year. The ratio of IOPS provisioned to the volume size requested can be a
maximum of 30. For example, to get 3,000 IOPS your volume size should be at least 100
GB.

Similar to PIOPS volumes, GP2 volumes are also SSD-based, but the IOPS you get from
GP2 volumes can vary from a baseline IOPS up to a maximum burstable 3,000 IOPS per
volume. This works very well for most database workloads because the IOPS
performance needed from the database varies many times during a period of time based
on the load size and the number of queries being executed.

General Purpose (SSD) volume performance is governed by volume size, which dictates
the base performance level of the volume and how quickly it accumulates I/O credits.
Larger volumes have higher base performance levels and accumulate I/O credits faster.

I/O credits represent the available bandwidth that your General Purpose (SSD) volume
can use to burst large amounts of I/O when more than the base performance is needed.
The more credits your volume has for I/O, the more time it can burst beyond its base
performance level and the better it performs when more performance is needed.

Throughput Optimized HDD volumes (st1) offers low-cost HDD volume designed for
intensive workloads that require less IOPS but high throughput. Oracle databases used
for data warehouses and data analytics purposes can leverage st1 volumes.

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