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We are planning to move our warehouse database (which is around 1TB) to the cloud. Currently we are looking at Amazon RDS and EC2 (as these supports multiple features which SQL Azure doesn't support). Also we need high availability along with failover cluster, and backups.

Can you guys please suggest when to use RDS and when to use EC2?

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Bad news. Fail over clustering assumes a shared high perfomance storage device and Amazon doesn't provide that. The Amazon high perfomance storage device is the EBS volume, but you can attach it to only one EC2 instance. You will find Amazon S3 mentioned as a alternative all around, but it really isn't one. S3 is designed to persist data, and have very low IO perfomance.

I think the alternative is to setup a NFS, but a NFS is a higher layer protocol to share files without having a shared block device subsystem. It will work, but you will never get the absolutely best performance.

About EC2 vs RDS: EC2 will provide maximum performance if you want to tune every little aspect. RDS provides the best perfomance out of the box, everything is a click away, and you have no worries about maintaining the instance. Also RDS is easier to scale up and down as you need.

I found a MySQL benchmark, take a look. http://blog.observu.com/2011/05/rds-vs-mysql-on-ec2-benchmark/

Also, I found a SQL Server Whitepaper about implementing Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups in the AWS Cloud: http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_WSFC_SQL_Server_AlwaysOn.pdf

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Thanks for sharing the info. I am also looking at "SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machine” which provides full SQL Server box product features and gives the administrator full control over a dedicated SQL Server instance and cloud-based VM. Can you please share any thoughts on "SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machine”. – user21207 Mar 15 at 12:52
@user21207 About your second question, if you post it as a new question, more users can try to help you, also your question will be more visible (in google etc) and help more people. Can you do that? – lolol Mar 15 at 13:00

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