View a markdown version of this page

MSFTCOST03-BP06 Evaluate Optimize CPU feature - Microsoft Workloads Lens - AWS Well-Architected Framework
Implementation guidanceResources

MSFTCOST03-BP06 Evaluate Optimize CPU feature

Optimize CPUs for Amazon EC2 Instances provides customers greater control of your EC2 instances on two fronts. First, you can specify a custom number of vCPUs to save on vCPU-based licensing costs (such as SQL Server). Second, you can disable multithreading for workloads that perform well with single-threaded CPUs, like certain high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Reducing the number of vCPUs or disabling multithreading offers fewer cores to your SQL Server workload on EC2 without affecting the other compute resources available to the machine (such as RAM and storage), and most of the time without compromising the workload performance. This feature is available for both Bring Your Own License (BYOL) and License Included (LI) deployments.

Desired outcome: By evaluating and implementing CPU optimization for Amazon EC2 instances, we aim to reduce vCPU-based licensing costs for SQL Server while maintaining workload performance. This will be achieved by specifying custom vCPU counts and, where appropriate, disabling multithreading. The outcome will be a more cost-effective utilization of resources, particularly for SQL Server workloads, without compromising on performance or available compute resources such as RAM and storage.

Common anti-patterns:

  • Over-provisioning vCPUs: Organizations often provision EC2 instances with more vCPUs than necessary for their SQL Server workloads, believing that more is better. This leads to unnecessarily high licensing costs for vCPU-based software like SQL Server, without providing any tangible performance benefits. The excess vCPUs remain unused while still incurring licensing fees.

  • Ignoring multithreading optimization: Many teams leave multithreading enabled by default for all workloads, including those that do not benefit from it (such as certain HPC applications or single-threaded workloads). This can result in suboptimal performance for these specific workloads and potentially higher licensing costs, as some software is licensed per logical processor rather than physical core.

Benefits of establishing this best practice:

  • Reduced SQL Server licensing costs through optimized vCPU allocation and core usage, resulting in direct cost savings.

  • Better workload performance by matching CPU configurations to specific needs, especially for single-threaded applications and HPC workloads.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium

Implementation guidance

Start by analyzing your SQL Server workload performance and resource utilization. Use AWS tools like CloudWatch to gather metrics. Identify instances where you can reduce vCPU count without impacting performance. Set instances with custom vCPU counts to match your licensing. Test disabling multithreading for workloads that benefit from single-threaded performance. Monitor performance closely after changes to ensure workload efficiency is maintained. Regularly review and adjust your configurations as workload demands evolve.

Implementation steps

  1. Analyze current SQL Server workload performance and resource utilization using AWS CloudWatch and other monitoring tools.

  2. Set EC2 instances with custom vCPU counts that align with your SQL Server licensing and workload requirements.

  3. Test and implement multithreading disablement for workloads that perform better with single-threaded CPUs, monitoring performance before and after the change.

Resources

Related documents: