Published on march 11, 2023
According to a recent benchmark conducted by Microsoft, SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines can run up to 57% faster and cost up to 54% less than running a similar workload on Amazon Web Services.
According to the GigaOm benchmark, SQL Server 2019 running on Azure achieves 57% more transactions per second (TPS) than when running on an AWS EC2 instance with GP3 volumes. AWS license mobility and Azure Hybrid Benefits could result in a 34% reduction in the cost of workloads on Azure without including these features.
A study has been conducted to compare the prices and performance of SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition on Windows Server 2022 running on Azure E32bds_v5 instances with Premium SSD v2 disks and AWS EC2 r5b.8xlarge instances with General Purpose (gp3) volumes. AWS and Azure both offer virtual machines with 32 virtual CPUs and 256 GB of memory.
These results demonstrate the advantages of the Ebdsv5 virtual machines over previous benchmarks on Azure.
As the new EBDsv5 VMs support higher IOPS when using Premium SSD v2, SQL Server is now able to perform better in high-frequency transactional workloads.
Despite the fact that the report was sponsored by Microsoft, the benchmark setup was not derived according to the specifications of TPC-E and TPC-H.
This is not the first time Microsoft has released a GigOm report comparing the performance of SQL Server deployed on Azure and AWS. In the past, AWS responded with articles such as “AWS continues to beat Azure on SQL Server price/performance” and “Fact-checking GigaOm’s Microsoft-sponsored benchmark claims”.
Although some experts have questioned the licensing impacts, Fred Wurden, vice president of AWS Commercial Software Services, has pointed out mismatches between the configurations and the price calculations, questioning the methodology.
GigaOm’s latest report and results have not been made public by Amazon Web Services.
