Category: Best Practices

Customers with multi-cloud environments struggle to effectively track and manage their usage and costs. They access the individual billing portals of each cloud provider to gather cost information. Without a consolidated view on cloud expenditure, making data-driven decisions to optimize costs becomes difficult. In September 2023 we introduced the Cloud Intelligence Dashboard for Azure. This […]

In this blog post, I will show you how you can strengthen security when using two-way trusts between your self-managed Microsoft Active Directory and your AWS Managed Microsoft AD for accessing AWS applications. Introduction Customers often want their self-managed Active Directory users to have a seamless authentication and authorization experience when using Amazon Web Services […]

Introduction In this blog post, I am going to show you how easy it is to deploy a secure infrastructure to manage your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for Microsoft Windows Server through the automation provided by AWS Launch Wizard. AWS Launch Wizard offers a guided way of sizing, configuring, and deploying AWS […]

In this blog, I will be covering how to set up a resource domain configuration for Amazon WorkSpaces using a one-way trust in Microsoft Active Directory. With this configuration you will deploy your Amazon WorkSpaces compute resources in one domain, while leveraging users from your trusted domain to log onto the Workspace. This is useful […]

In this blog post, we will cover how to retrieve billing info manually for Microsoft workloads running in your Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts. This is helpful when reviewing your existing Microsoft licensing and for long-term cost modeling with your Microsoft license investment in your AWS environment. Introduction When you’re running Microsoft Windows workloads on […]

In this blog post, I will share details on the new AWS Launch Wizard application programming interface (APIs) that allow programmatic deployment for Microsoft SQL Server workloads. This new API release helps you integrate AWS Launch Wizard with existing deployment tools. Introduction The AWS Launch Wizard service guides customers through the sizing, configuration, and deployment […]

In this blog post, I will show you how to use the myApplications dashboard in the AWS Management Console. Using a sample .NET application, I will demonstrate how you can manage costs, monitor, and optimize your Microsoft workloads with this new dashboard. Introduction Assume you are a web application owner and it’s your team’s responsibility […]

In this blog post, we will show how to reduce the administrative burden of enabling Amazon CloudWatch memory metric monitoring on Windows Server EC2 instances using AWS Systems Manager automation. Once enabled, we will show how memory monitoring benefits downstream services like AWS Compute Optimizer to provide accurate cost savings recommendations. Monitoring is an important […]

Disclaimer: The use of Microsoft software is subject to Microsoft’s terms. When using Microsoft Software as a customer of AWS, you are fully responsible for complying with Microsoft licensing terms. This information is only provided as a guide for your convenience, and you should not rely on its descriptions nor consider it any form of […]

In this blog post, we will show you how to perform an automated in-place upgrade of your standalone Microsoft SQL Server instances installed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). This solution supports upgrades to SQL Server 2016, SQL Server 2017, SQL Server 2019, and SQL Server 2022. Introduction As new versions of SQL Server […]