Amazon EC2 reduces costs for Microsoft SQL Server High-Availability deployments

Posted on: Nov 17, 2025

Today, AWS announced that you can now designate Amazon EC2 instances running license-included SQL Server as part of a High-Availability (HA) cluster to reduce licensing costs with just a few clicks.

This enhancement is particularly valuable for mission-critical SQL Server databases with Always On Availability Groups and/or Always On failover cluster instances. For example, you can save up to 40% of the full HA costs with no performance compromises when running SQL Server HA on two m8i.4xlarge instances with license-included Windows and SQL Server.

This feature is available in all commercial AWS Regions.

To learn more, see Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon EC2 User Guide or read the blog post.