Why AWS is the best place for your Windows workloads, and how Microsoft is changing their licensing to try to awkwardly force you into Azure

This post is also located on LinkedIn. 

Many companies today are considering how to migrate to the cloud to take advantage of the agility and innovation that the cloud brings. Having the right to choose the best provider for your business is critical.

AWS is the best cloud for running your Windows workloads and our experience running Windows applications has earned our customers’ trust. It’s been more than 11 years since AWS first made it possible for customers to run their Windows workloads on AWS—longer than Azure has even been around, and according to a report by IDC, we host nearly two times as many Windows Server instances in the cloud as Microsoft. And more and more enterprises are entrusting their Windows workloads to AWS because of its greater reliability, higher performance, and lower cost, with the number of AWS enterprise customers using AWS for Windows Server growing more than 400% in the past three years.

In fact, we are seeing a trend of customers moving from Azure to AWS. eMarketer started their digital transformation with Azure, but found performance challenges and higher costs that led them to migrate all of their workloads over to AWS. Why did they migrate? They found a better experience, stronger support, higher availability, and better performance, with 4x faster launch times and 35% lower costs compared to Azure. Ancestry, a leader in consumer genomics, went all-in on development in the cloud moving 10 PB data and 400 Windows-based applications in less than 9 months. They also modernized to Linux with .NET Core and leveraged advanced technologies including serverless and containers. With results like that, you can see why organizations like Sysco, Edwards Life Sciences, Expedia, and NextGen Healthcare have chosen AWS to upgrade, migrate, and modernize their Windows workloads

If you are interested in seeing your cost savings over running on-premises or over running on Azure,  send us an email at SandyCT@Amazon.com or visit why AWS is the best cloud for Windows.