Microsoft Workloads on AWS

Category: Advanced (300)

Automate Active Directory domain join activities at scale with AWS Systems Manager

In a previous blog post, I showed how you can use AWS Systems Manager Automation to dynamically automate domain join and unjoin activities with Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) for your Windows instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The previous solution showed you how to manually domain join/unjoin activities against single or multiple […]

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.

Simplifying Active Directory domain join with AWS Systems Manager

In this blog post, I will present a solution for managing the Active Directory domain membership for a dynamic fleet of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Windows instances using Automation, a capability of AWS Systems Manager. Using Systems Manager Automation, you can dynamically automate domain join and unjoin activities with Microsoft Active Directory Domain […]

How Dow Jones migrated and modernized its business-critical databases in one motion to gain effectiveness and cost benefits

As one of the largest business and financial news companies in the world, millions of people around the world rely on Dow Jones properties for their daily market data needs. The Market Data platform, one of Dow Jones’ most critical business systems, serves the real-time markets data to all of its news sites, including WSJ.com, […]

SQL Server High Availability Deployments Using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

UPDATE: On 26th May 2022, AWS Launch Wizard added support to SQL Server deployments using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. AWS Launch Wizard uses a simple console wizard to simplify the deployment of SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. To learn more about using AWS Launch Wizard, visit the […]

Instrumenting .NET applications with AWS X-Ray using Aspect-oriented Programming

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is an approach that enhances modularity by allowing developers to pull out cross-cutting concerns. AOP does so by adding attribute (advice) to the existing code without modifying the code itself. Classic examples of these cross-cutting concerns include caching, logging, monitoring, and, in our case, AWS X-Ray tracing. With AOP, tracing a call […]

How to migrate legacy IIS-based applications to new versions of Windows Server without refactoring using AWS EMP

Many organizations have legacy Internet Information Services (IIS) based applications that run on Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2. These versions of Windows Server are no longer supported and customers are looking into ways to migrate these legacy applications onto modern Windows Server and IIS-based versions without having to rewrite the application. The AWS EMP tooling provides the necessary tools to migrate an IIS 6.0, 7.0, and 7.5 based application and any other application dependencies the IIS website may have onto a modern, secure, and supported Windows Server version

Implementing security notifications for end user activity on Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

Security is job zero at AWS. Logging end user access to customer data is a key component of many customers’ internal security policies and compliance needs. End user access audit logs can be used to conduct periodic security audits and forensic investigations for security incidents. However, customers often need to learn about potentially anomalous behavior […]