Posted On: Jul 6, 2017

Starting today, you can increase the redundancy and performance of your directory managed by AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD, by deploying additional domain controllers.

AWS Microsoft AD is a highly available, managed Active Directory built on actual Windows Server 2012 R2 in the AWS Cloud. With AWS Microsoft AD, you do not have to synchronize identities from your on-premises Active Directory domain to the AWS Cloud. AWS provides automated software updates, security patching, and failover as part of the service.

Adding domain controllers increases the redundancy, which results in even greater resilience and higher availability. Adding domain controllers also improves the performance of your applications by enabling directory clients to load-balance their requests across a larger number of domain controllers. For example, AWS Microsoft AD enables you to use large fleets of Amazon EC2 instances to run your .NET applications that perform frequent user attribute lookups.

AWS Microsoft AD is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), and South America (São Paulo) Regions.

To learn more about how to add domain controllers to your AWS Microsoft AD directory, see the AWS Directory Service documentation and How to Improve Availability and Performance of Your AWS Microsoft AD Directory by Deploying Additional Domain Controllers.