Microsoft Workloads on AWS

Category: Amazon EC2

Setting up Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL for performance testing using HammerDB

In this blog post, I will provide details on how to set up Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL for performance analysis using the HammerDB performance tool. 1.   Introduction Whether it’s a component of migrating to AWS or optimizing workloads already on AWS, customers are looking at the options to modernize their SQL Server workloads. An attractive […]

How to calculate a Dedicated Hosts cost estimate for Windows Server and SQL Server

In this blog post, I will show you how to use the new Dedicated Host packing and pricing capability for Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server in the AWS Pricing Calculator. This used to be a manual process, but our customers wanted us to automate it—so here we are. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon […]

Deploying Microsoft Always On VPN on AWS

In this blog post, I will detail how to create a cost-effective, secure, and resilient VPN remote access architecture on AWS. With the increasing number of full-time remote employees and a mobile workforce, the requirement for remote access has moved from a nice-to-have feature to one that can have a significant financial impact in the […]

Convert Ansible playbooks for AMI creation into EC2 Image Builder component documents

In this post, I will show you how to automate the conversion of Ansible playbooks into EC2 Image Builder components. Automating this conversion is useful for migrations to EC2 Image Builder, where the amount of Ansible playbooks is considerable and manually creating an equivalent AWS Task Orchestrator and Executor (AWSTOE) component for each playbook becomes […]

How to set up Microsoft Office on Amazon EC2

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced the general availability of Microsoft Office, along with Remote Desktop Service Subscriber Access License (RDS SAL), as license included offerings on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Empowering employees to work from anywhere with many different devices is at the core of many of our customers’ IT strategy. […]

Backup SQL Server databases to Amazon S3

In this blog post, I will explore the new functionality in SQL Server 2022 that allows you to run native backups directly to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). I will also review the best practices for security and considerations of cost and performance. Update: We have recently published a new blog on how to […]

Reduce failover times for SQL Server on Amazon EC2 instance using Network Load Balancer

This blog post will show you how to use AWS’ Network Load Balancer (NLB) to reduce outage time for legacy clients in response to a SQL Server Always On availability group failover A popular option to achieve SQL Server high availability (HA) is to implement SQL Server multi-subnet clustering for Always-On availability groups (AO-AG) across […]

Provisioning SQL Server on Amazon EC2 with AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, and AWS Systems Manager

Automating the process of deploying SQL Server on Amazon EC2 not only simplifies the deployment, but it also gives customers the ability to spin up additional SQL Server instances for additional capacity or spin down instances when not in use to save money. The provisioning of SQL Server is a multi-step process that is outlined in this blog.