Amazon RDS to Graviton Migration Optimizes Cost & Performance For A Streaming Platform

Optimizing Amazon RDS workloads to support cost-efficient scaling

The customer, a leading streaming platform with over 100 million app downloads, well known for its original shows and premium global content, wanted to proactively optimize its cloud strategy and infrastructure to align cost and performance with growth.

The team sought to control operational expenditure and improve the performance of their application stack hosted on AWS. The focus area was their Amazon RDS environment, where database instances were still running on older-generation instance types.

While there were no immediate service issues, the performance-to-cost ratio of existing Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) instances was proving suboptimal. This was identified via internal monitoring and AWS Trusted Advisor insights. To sustain growth without escalating cloud costs, a strategic upgrade was needed – one that would not disrupt live services.

Migration of Amazon Intel RDS to AWS Graviton-based instances

The Cloud Kinetics team was engaged to support the migration of Amazon RDS from Intel-based instances to AWS Graviton-based instances. The Graviton-based instances are designed to deliver better price and performance for cloud-native workloads.

As part of the engagement, the Cloud Kinetics team migrated Amazon RDS workloads (MySQL) to AWS Graviton-powered instances (db.m7g).

• The workload primarily included transactional processing, analytics queries and time-sensitive data updates.
• In the joint discovery and testing phase, a dedicated team from Cloud Kinetics comprising AWS-certified engineers worked with the customer’s internal engineering team. The Cloud Kinetics team included Database and Infra Architects, Migration Specialists and Performance Engineers.
• Native AWS services used included Amazon RDS, Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Cost Explorer.
• Blue-Green deployment migration ensured zero downtime and the migration was validated across staging and production within the sprint cycle.

This timely migration to Amazon RDS on Graviton instances has enabled the business to lower cloud costs while improving database performance, further reinforcing their already resilient infrastructure.

Zero downtime migration, immediate gains in cost and performance

The migration to Graviton-powered Amazon RDS instances was completed within a week with zero downtime, seamlessly dovetailing with the customer’s Agile sprint cycle. No application refactoring was needed and the team maintained availability SLA throughout migration.

The customer has seen improved scaling performance under load without increasing instance size. Cloud cost savings led to a 15.9% reduction in overall Amazon RDS spend.

In addition, performance gains like 14% improvement in query execution time and overall DB responsiveness were registered. The success of this project has enhanced confidence in AWS Graviton for optimization strategies.

Since the successful completion of this migration, the customer has expressed interest in expanding Graviton usage to AWS EC2 workloads. Cloud Kinetics will assist with a broader compute optimization strategy, potentially leveraging AWS Compute Optimizer and Savings Plans as needed.

With streaming adoption continuing to rise, the customer is well-positioned to scale operations with a cloud environment that is cost-optimized, high-performing and future-ready.