Scale Your SQL Server Workloads Without Doubling Your Costs

Tired of watching your SQL Server licensing costs spike every time you scale up? Most modern servers run with hyper-threading enabled, effectively doubling your vCPU count—and your SQL Server licensing exposure—without delivering proportional performance gains. In this session, I show you how to use AWS Optimize CPU to take back control. You’ll learn how to right-size core and thread configurations so you can scale memory and storage IOPS for your SQL Server workloads on AWS without having to double your license costs. I walk through how Optimize CPU works under the hood, why it matters for SQL Server licensing, and share results from real-world testing that demonstrate up to ~50% reduction in licensing costs with minimal impact on performance. You’ll leave with practical patterns, configuration examples, and a simple decision framework you can apply immediately to optimize both cost and performance.

Practical framework to scale SQL Server on AWS without automatically doubling licensing costs How to use AWS Optimize CPU (cores/threads configuration) to cut SQL Server licensing by up to ~50% while preserving performance Concrete configuration patterns, instance mappings, and test results you can apply immediately in your own environments