Amazon EC2 instance type

AWS has a large number of Amazon EC2 instance types available, so you can choose the instance type that best fits your workload. However, not all the available instance types are best suited for running Oracle Database.

If you use Amazon RDS for your Oracle Database, AWS filters out some of the instance types based on best practices, and gives you the various options in T- class, M-class and R-class instances. AWS recommends that you choose db.m- based or r-based Amazon RDS instances for any enterprise database workloads. R5 instances are well suited for memory intensive applications such as high-performance databases.

For the latest information about RDS instances, refer to Amazon RDS for Oracle Database Pricing. Your choice of the Amazon RDS instance type should be based on the database workload and the Oracle Database licenses available.

If you’re running your self-managed database on Amazon EC2, you have many more choices available for the Amazon EC2 instance type. This is often one of the reasons users opt to run Oracle Database on Amazon EC2 instead of using Amazon RDS.

Very small instance types are not suitable because Oracle Database is resource-intensive when it comes to CPU usage. Instances with a larger memory footprint help improve database performance by providing better caching and a bigger system global area (SGA). AWS recommends that you choose instances that have a good balance of memory and CPU.

Choose the instance type that matches the Oracle Database licenses you are planning to use and the architecture you are planning to implement. For architectures best suited for your business needs, refer to the whitepaper Advanced Architectures for Oracle Database on Amazon EC2.

Oracle Database uses disk storage heavily for read/write operations, so AWS highly recommends that you use only instances optimized for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). Amazon EBS-optimized instances deliver dedicated throughput between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS. Bandwidth and throughput to the storage subsystem is crucial for good database performance. Choose instances with higher network performance for better database performance.

The following instance families are best suited for running Oracle Database on Amazon EC2.