Microsoft Workloads on AWS

Category: Technical How-to

Update AWS Tools for PowerShell at scale with AWS Systems Manager

In this blog post, I will show you how to update AWS Tools for PowerShell at scale within your environment by using the AWS Systems Manager Run Command. Manually updating AWS Tools for PowerShell across multiple instances can be time-consuming, inefficient, and error prone. These manual operational efforts typically result in a logistical nightmare, especially […]

Convert licenses of SQL Servers migrated with AWS Application Migration Service

In this blog post, I will show you how to convert Microsoft SQL Server licenses to an AWS provided license included using post-launch settings in the AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN). When you are migrating your SQL Servers to Amazon Web Services (AWS), you have a variety of options for using new and existing […]

Use Azure DevOps to deploy AWS Glue jobs in CI/CD pipeline

In this blog post, we will walk you through an example using AWS Toolkit for Azure DevOps to deploy your AWS Glue jobs across multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts to simulate development and production environments. Introduction AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data […]

Automated user creation and provisioning in Active Directory and Amazon WorkSpaces

For customers that have workloads in the AWS Cloud, a common use case is the provisioning of new user accounts in Active Directory, and subsequently, WorkSpaces for these new users. In this blog post, we will present an efficient and reusable solution to automate the creation, provisioning, and deprovisioning of Microsoft Active Directory (AD) user […]

Optimizing large-scale migration of SQL Server databases to Amazon EC2 using backup metadata

In this blog post, we explore how the Microsoft SQL Server backup metadata, known as backup headers, can be leveraged when migrating from on premises to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). This technique is particularly useful when access to source database information is non-existent or only backup files are available with no access to […]

Automatically create self-managed licenses in multiple accounts using tags

In this blog post, we will demonstrate how you can set up self-managed licenses to be tracked automatically through tagging. Managing licenses for software running on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) is critical for compliance and auditing purposes. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a free tool, AWS License Manager, to help you manage your licenses. However, license […]

How to generate TLS certificates for a highly available Remote Desktop Gateway Farm

Introduction In this blog post, I am going to show you how to generate, import, test, and troubleshoot a properly created Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate for a Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) farm. Secure management of your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for Microsoft Windows Server is a top priority for any […]

Accelerate Remote Desktop Gateway deployments with AWS Launch Wizard

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 Cloud Compute (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 resources […]

Using Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate to automate Azure DevOps Hosted Agents

In this blog post, we will show you how to use Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with AWS Fargate as hosted agents to deploy applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS) using Microsoft Azure Pipelines. This is a continuation of a previous post about using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling with your […]

Secure API authorization in Amazon API Gateway using Microsoft Entra ID

In this blog post, we will guide you through the process of setting up an AWS Lambda authorizer with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) using OpenID Connect (OIDC). This will allow you to use the authentication from Entra ID as an identity provider for your Amazon API Gateway. Securing your APIs is crucial […]