Microsoft Workloads on AWS

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Launch Microsoft Windows Server instances on Amazon EC2 up to 65% faster than before

Introduction AWS customers running Microsoft Windows Server instances face long wait times while provisioning instances, as the Windows Server operating system (OS) goes through a lengthy boot process. For developers and IT professionals, this can make it difficult to support deployment time and system capacity service level agreements (SLAs). When meeting highly-demanding SLAs for mission-critical […]

Reduce Storage Costs by setting up MetaCacheDatabase for Microsoft Exchange 2019 on AWS

Challenge Microsoft Exchange is a storage-heavy application, so storage may become cost prohibitive for new deployments. Solid state drives and faster spinning disks are still costly options when multiple copies of the same data needs to be replicated across the global infrastructure. Storage costs have made offerings like Microsoft Office 365 an enticing alternative. In […]

Implement a SQL Server HA/DR solution on AWS Outposts

In highly-regulated industries, such as financial services, in-country data residency requirements can often challenge cloud adoption, especially in countries without an AWS Region. In such a case, AWS Outposts could be a good solution to achieve durability and availability whilst complying with in-country data requirements. Outposts, which provides a pool of compute and storage capacity […]

Migrating Microsoft Azure SQL DB to Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition

Migrating a Microsoft Azure SQL database typically requires using database tools to extract data from the Azure SQL database, making necessary schema changes on the target database, and then importing the data into the target database. This usually involves manual steps and extended periods of downtime to the source applications. What if there was a […]

Building Windows containers with AWS CodePipeline on AWS GovCloud (US)

Many AWS GovCloud (US) customers and their partners use AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild to build Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines on AWS. Building on AWS GovCloud (US), however, introduces a few restrictions, not present in other AWS Regions, when implementing pipelines for Windows container applications. In this blog post, I will explain what these […]

How to set up disaster recovery for SQL Server Always On Availability Groups using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

Traditional disaster recovery methods for Microsoft SQL Server require duplication of infrastructure, operating systems, licensing and other third-party applications, rendering it a highly expensive IT project – even prohibitively expensive for some organizations. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) provides organizations with a more modern approach to protecting Microsoft SQL Server environments: cloud-based disaster recovery […]

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 […]

Modernizing ASP.NET Web Forms applications to Blazor using Porting Assistant for .NET

ASP.NET Web Forms has been a part of the .NET Framework since its initial release in 2002 and continues to power many web applications today. Customers want to modernize these applications to ASP.NET Core to realize cost savings, enhance performance, and increased agility. However, the .NET team confirmed that Web Forms will not be ported to ASP.NET Core. This means […]

Deploying SQL Server Always Encrypted with secure enclaves on Amazon EC2 instances

Always Encrypted with secure enclaves is an encryption technology available in SQL Server 2019, which allows rich computations on encrypted data. With increased focus on data protection, this feature helps customers to protect sensitive data, such as credit card numbers or national identification numbers (for example, U.S. social security numbers) stored in SQL Server databases. […]