Skip to content
hands-on lab

Migrating to Amazon RDS Graviton2 Database Instances

Difficulty: Intermediate
Duration: Up to 1 hour
Students: 122
Rating: 5/5
Start lab
On average, students complete this lab in45m
Get guided in a real environmentPractice with a step-by-step scenario in a real, provisioned environment.
Learn and validateUse validations to check your solutions every step of the way.
See resultsTrack your knowledge and monitor your progress.
About
Author

Description

Graviton2 is the second generation of Amazon Web Service's designed processors offering attractive price-performance characteristics. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) provides a variety of options for using Graviton2 in RDS. For existing RDS databases, there are also options available for migrating from an x86-based database instance class to a Graviton2 instance class. This lab explores two options first-hand:

  1. Restoring a new Graviton2 database instance from a snapshot
  2. Modifying an existing x86 database instance to a Graviton2 database instance

As you will see, no porting or code changes are required when migrating from x86 to Graviton2 instances on Amazon RDS. Amazon's Database Migration Service (DMS) can also be a useful tool for the migration use case in this lab but is not in scope for this lab. DMS is covered in other labs.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this intermediate-level lab, you will be able to:

  • Use RDS database instance snapshots to migrate to Graviton2 RDS database instance
  • Perform in-place upgrades to Graviton2 RDS database instances

Intended Audience

  • Cloud engineers
  • Cost optimization teams
  • Database administrators
  • Data engineers

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the following will be beneficial but is not required:

  • Amazon Relational Database
  • MySQL

The following content can be used to fulfill the prerequisite:

Updates

April 15th, 2025 - Updated minor version of RDS MySQL database and screenshots to reflect latest UI

May 16th, 2023 - Updated the RDS MySQL database to the latest version

Environment before

Environment after

Covered topics

Amazon Web Services
Compute for AWS
Databases for AWS
Amazon RDS
AWS Graviton
SQL for AWS
SQL
Compute
Databases
Hands-on Lab UUID

Lab steps

Logging In to the Amazon Web Services Console
Connecting to a Shell using AWS Systems Manager
Preparing the x86 RDS Database and Snapshot
Creating a Graviton2 RDS Database Instance From a Snapshot
Modifying an RDS Dababase Instance to Use Graviton2

Lab Rules