Build Your Windows and .NET on AWS Skills at re:Invent 2021

This post is written by Tom McCafferty, Principal Product Marketing.

Join us at AWS re:Invent 2021 – Nov 29th – Dec 3rd – to accelerate migration and modernization of your Microsoft workloads.

This year the Windows Track will focus on how to maximize the performance of on-premises workloads on AWS, improve security and identity capabilities with Microsoft Active Directory, and use advanced tools and services for migration so you can lower your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and reduce costs, take advantage of flexible licensing options, and innovation with managed services and open-source options.

Running .NET applications on AWS has never been better and our .NET Track sessions at re:Invent this year reflect that excitement. All our sessions are for builders who want real-world insights and coding examples they can immediately apply in their applications

AWS supports everything you need to build and run applications, including Active Directory, System Center, SQL Server, Visual Studio, and Windows desktop-as-a-service. Register today to learn from AWS experts and customers like you presenting solutions and services in the following sessions:

WINDOWS SESSIONS

Breakout and Builder Sessions

WIN301:  Security Best Practices for Running Microsoft Tech on AWS

This session discusses how to operate Microsoft technologies securely on AWS, including enabling security best practices using AWS Managed Microsoft AD, building and deploying security-hardened Amazon EC2 Windows images using CIS and STIG baselines, administering Windows instances securely, and taking advantage of hardware advances to improve security. The session also covers how to deploy applications in regulated regions that meet FedRAMP High, FIPS, and other compliance programs.

WIN304: Deep Dive into Windows Engineering

In this session, learn how AWS service teams engineer and innovate in support of Windows and SQL workloads. We share details of how AWS optimizes the boot time of Windows and SQL images to support your auto scaling needs, provide enhanced storage options with Amazon EBS, and engineer security with AWS Nitro Enclaves.

WIN307:  Learn how to Modernize your Microsoft Workloads on AWS

Modernizing Microsoft Windows workloads can be difficult. There are many stages and possible methods of modernization. In this session, learn how to approach Windows modernization and learn about tools and services that can help you with this journey. The session also includes an example of how to modernize your .NET Framework application running on Windows using AWS products such as AWS App2Container and Porting Assistant for .NET.

WIN308:  Amazon EC2 Image Builder Deep Dive:  Customize Windows Sever Images

EC2 Image Builder, makes it easier and faster to build and maintain secure images. In this session, we discuss the nuts and bolts of this service. We deep dive into AWS Task Orchestrator and Executor (TOE), the application that EC2 Image Builder uses to run components during the image build workflow. Come learn how to develop and test your own EC2 Image Builder components for Windows Server using TOE.

Hands-on Workshops

WIN302:  Workshop: Managing and Governing Microsoft Workloads on AWS

Having migrated your Microsoft Windows workloads to AWS, you need to manage this new environment. Where do you start? With what services?  In this session, learn best practices and approaches for managing your Microsoft Windows-based infrastructure on AWS. This session covers how you can manage Windows servers at scale and maximize cloud benefits with services such as AWS Systems Manager, Amazon CloudWatch agent, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, and Amazon EC2 launch templates. Learn how to build simple and effective solutions to deploy and manage logging, patching, configuration drift, inventory, licensing, and more

WIN303:  Workshop: Build and operate Windows Containers on Amazon EKS

In this workshop, you will learn how to deploy and manage an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) cluster for Windows containers, handling different Windows versions in the same cluster, setting up gMSA for Kerberos authentication on Windows containers, and managing persistent storage through EBS volumes

WIN305:  Workshop: Microsoft Active Directory to SSO:  The AWS Identity Journey

This session will cover setting up AWS Managed AD, extending your directory across multiple regions, creating a trust with on-premises directories, and verifying on-premises authentication to Amazon RDS SQL resources. You will then integrate your AWS Managed AD with AWS SSO.

WIN306:  Workshop: Architect Reliable Applications on AWS

Do you have Microsoft Windows workloads running in AWS? Are you responsible for ensuring these applications experience no downtime? In this session, learn how to apply the Reliability Pillar from the AWS Well-Architected Framework to your Microsoft Windows workloads. You will learn architectural best practices, how to maximize reliability, design for different levels of availability, and ensure you have a plan in place to recover from failure.

.NET SESSIONS

Breakout Sessions

XNT301: What’s New with .NET Development & Deployment on AWS

Developers are continually looking for ways improve deployments of .NET applications to reduce errors and increase productivity. New deployment tooling incorporates best AWS practices right from the start providing you recommendations and the optimal deployment option for your .NET application. Additional automation, helps you create a repeatable deployment process for your application you can store and share across teams and projects. In this talk, we you will see how deployments using a new set of open-sourced tools help you more efficiently develop .NET applications and focus on application business logic to deliver well architected cloud-native .NET Applications.

XNT302: Implementing Observability for .NET Apps on AWS

Are you confident you can quickly identify service problems and resolve performance issues at scale? Isolating and remediating performance problems in the cloud, particularly with modern, distributed, microservice architectures is challenging. In this session we will show you how to implement Observability for your .NET applications using logs, metrics, and traces that unlock your ability to build better systems and increase operational efficiency. You will learn AWS best practices for implementing Observability with services including CloudWatch, X-Ray, and AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry.

XNT303:  Accelerate .NET 6 performance with ARM64 on AWS Graviton2

In this session, you’ll learn how to achieve up to 30% greater performance and 40% better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances running .NET 6 applications on AWS Graviton2. We’ll dive into the details on how to compile ASP.NET Core for ARM64, and deploy to Graviton2. Next, we’ll automate the deployment process with an ARM64-based CI/CD pipeline, and benchmark a sample application on both Graviton2 and x86-instances to quantify the benefits. Finally, we’ll highlight differences in threading strategies vs x86-based instances, and other optimization techniques that will give you the confidence to build .NET 6 applications with Graviton2.

XNT304: Modernizing .NET Applications with Purpose Built Databases

Do you want to get the most out of your existing .NET applications in terms of database performance, scalability and value but don’t want to make wholesale changes to your application?  Do you want to understand how moving to a key-value or search database impacts your code?  AWS has 15 purpose-built databases that .NET developers can start using now to help supplement or completely replace traditional relational databases. We will get hands on and show you how to take an existing .NET application and move a segment of the relational database to a purpose built database.

XNT401: Build High-performance .NET Serverless Architectures on AWS

Are your .NET serverless applications tuned for performance? In this session you will learn AWS architectural best practices for .NET serverless applications which help you save development time, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. You will also learn various serverless architectures and implementation design patterns for connecting NoSQL or relational data stores and will help optimize key performance capabilities including cold start times in .NET Lambda functions.

Workshops and Chalk Talks

XNT306: Workshop: Modern .NET Applications:  Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD

This hands-on workshop will take you through an end-to-end ASP.NET application modernization scenario. In this session, you will take an existing .NET Framework application, analyze and identify components to be modernized, and then modernize it using AWS tools and best practices for .NET. Finally you will use modern Infrastructure as Code tools to create the resources to host the application in the cloud, along with an automated deployment pipeline.

XNT307: Chalk Talk: Strategies for Deconstructing Your .NET Monolith

Are you looking to accelerate your .NET modernization project by quickly and effectively breaking down your legacy .NET monolith? We will share and explain strategies we’ve seen customers use for evaluating their portfolio of applications to determine using AWS supported tools to help you break apart your legacy applications. Then the audience will vote on an application types and discuss the alternatives for how to refactor it into a cloud-native application. The talk will cover strategies for modernizing existing applications, how to prioritize, when to lift and shift versus refactoring your .NET monolith into independent services.

Attending in person? Join Microsoft on AWS experts in the AWS Expo area to ask questions, provide feedback and get solutions to your specific challenges!  Can’t make it? Check out the full catalog of keynotes and sessions available virtually.