Swapping AWS BYOL to LI RDS Costs
- Stephanie Gooch
- May 29, 2019
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 4, 2019
Bring Your Own Licence or BYOL, which should not be confused with BYOB (Bring Your Own Booze), is the process which allows Amazon Web Services users to utilise their pre-existing Microsoft licences, such as Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS). The feature for selecting BYOL for Microsoft SQL is being terminated as an option at the end of June. This is due to Microsoft’s decision to end this unique arrangement with the cloud provider.
So for large companies who have their own set of Microsoft licences, like the company I work for, how will this affect them?
Well, from a technical point of view the RDS's will be automatically switched from BYOL to LI within the maintenance window for the database. In short this will cause the following:
Multi-AZ instances will experience a fail-over (60-120 seconds)
Single-AZ instances will experience 10-15 minutes of downtime
Costs will approximately double in price
So, the immediate concern for many developers is that there is going to be some potential downtime for their applications. However, it is significant that the price for these services will approximately double due to now having to include a licence cost for Microsoft. Here are some suggestions to help to mitigate this increase in cost:
Change to smaller Instance types e.g. .xlarge to .large. This could save around 20%.
Change to a newer instance type e.g. if you have m3 try changing to m4 or m5 as these will save about 10% of the cost.
Consider purchasing RI's as this can save up to 63% of costs for non ephemeral services.
For Dev or Test RDS's set a single AZ, saving about 60%.
For Dev or Test RDS's you can utilise scheduling to turn off at night and the weekend. This could save over 50%.
If using standard SQL change to the web version if possible. This could save over 75%.
You can change from MSSQL to another database engine such as PostgreSQL or MySQL which can save about 35%.
Finally check if RDS is being used or is idle and if not needed delete (simple as) and save 100%.
Not all of these options are applicable for all cases however having some of these ready to use means you won’t suffer as much from the increase in price.
Hopefully this has shed some light on how you can handle this increase in costs and manage them efficiently. Enough so you could even relax this weekend at a BYOB.
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