New update at Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS): stake around performance.

For those who unfamiliar, in the Amazon Web Service environment, upgrading to a new version of your chosen database engine without RDS, can’t be easy and time-consuming exercise. Therefore you need to find extra servers and storage to do a test upgrade, create and verify backups, test all of your applications,

and then upgrade the production database.

Since March 14, 2013 officially Amazon has introduced a new feature to allow you to perform an in-place upgrade of your SQL Server 2008 R2 database instances to SQL Server 2012 with just a few clicks.

To upgrade, the process aims to be simple, just select the target database instance in the AWS Management Console and initiate a Modify operation. Choose the SQL Server 2012 engine and click on Continue and follow the instructions.

Finally Amazon has also introduced three new features to make Amazon RDS more powerful and more scalable:

1.     Up to 3 TB of storage and 30,000 Provisioned IOPS: this means that you can work with larger datasets and you can read and write the data faster than before.

2.     Conversion from Standard Storage to Provisioned IOPS storage: this means that you can convert DB instances with Standard Storage to Provisioned IOPS in order to gain the benefits of fast and predictable performance.

3.     Independent scaling of IOPS and storage: this means that you can now scale Provisioned IOPS and storage independently.