Use an Amazon EBS-optimized instance type

If your SQL Server database handles I/O-intensive workloads, provisioning Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) optimized instances will help improve performance.

An Amazon EBS-optimized instance uses an optimized configuration stack and provides additional, dedicated capacity for Amazon EBS I/O. This optimization provides the best performance for your EBS volumes by minimizing contention between Amazon EBS I/O and other traffic from your instance.