Best practices for deploying Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon EC2
Abhishek Soni and Sagar Patel, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
December 2023 (document history)
The purpose of this guide is to ensure a consistent experience after deploying or migrating Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. It provides best practices for configuring your database and server, to help optimize your infrastructure, tune performance, and avoid running into unexpected issues after deployment or migration.
This guide is for database architects, systems and database leads, and administrators who are planning to migrate Microsoft SQL Server from their on-premises environment to Amazon EC2, or who want to optimize their new SQL Server deployment on Amazon EC2.
Amazon EC2 provides scalable compute capacity in the AWS Cloud. Using SQL Server on Amazon EC2 is similar to running SQL Server on premises. Amazon EC2 gives you full control over your infrastructure and your database environment. You benefit from the scale, performance, and elasticity of the AWS Cloud, but you’re responsible for configuring and tuning all components, including EC2 instances, storage volumes, file systems, networking, and security. This guide provides information to help you optimize your configuration and maximize SQL Server performance on AWS. It discusses server and storage settings and best practices in detail. It also explains how to automate settings where applicable, and discusses configuration changes at the database level.
Note
AWS also offers options for moving your on-premises SQL Server database to a managed service like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server. For a discussion of migration options, see Migration strategy for relational databases on the AWS Prescriptive Guidance website.