Microsoft Workloads on AWS

Category: Technical How-to

Accelerate Microsoft Exchange Server deployments with AWS Launch Wizard

Managing your infrastructure as code improves consistency and reliability of your deployments. Using the AWS Launch Wizard for Exchange Server, you can deploy a reference architecture for Exchange Server according to best practices with minimal effort. In this post, we will discuss options available within the Launch Wizard and then deploy a fully functional Exchange […]

Automate the Upgrade of an Amazon FSx for Windows File Server to a Multi-AZ deployment

For many workloads, customers use Amazon FSx for Windows File Server (Amazon FSx), a fully managed storage service based on Windows File Server. For non-production workloads, a single Availability Zone (AZ) deployment may be sufficient. But sometimes, the need arises to add high availability to the storage in an environment. Customers need a simple way […]

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. Solution overview The Backup to URL feature was released with SQL […]

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 […]

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 […]

Running your modern CoreWCF application on AWS

Running your modern CoreWCF application on AWS

In this blog post, we will show you how to deploy a CoreWCF application on an Amazon Linux Graviton2 instance. Also, we will provide a sample application that integrates with Amazon CloudWatch. This approach of running CoreWCF applications on Linux and integration with other AWS services gives customers the ability to improve performance, increase security, […]

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.

Port legacy VB.NET applications to .NET 6.0 with Porting Assistant for .NET

Since its release in 2002, Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) has been a popular choice for software developers creating Windows-based applications. With the release of .NET 6.0, some exciting changes are available for developers. This version of .NET boasts some amazing features that are sure to make your applications faster, more reliable, and easier to maintain. […]

Accelerate IIS for Windows Server deployments with AWS Launch Wizard

With our goal to enhance the customer experience of deploying enterprise workloads on AWS, we are excited to introduce one of our latest offerings – AWS Launch Wizard for Internet Information Services (IIS). To enable quick and simple deployments for IIS, Launch Wizard consolidates necessary configuration details into one wizard and orchestrates the provisioning of […]

The refreshed AWS Launch Wizard for Active Directory deployment release

AWS recently refreshed the AWS Launch Wizard Active Directory (AD) deployment with improvements and new options. In this post, we will cover what has changed and also how these changes may influence future updates to the service. In this refreshed release, we have updated the following: Option to install AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory with […]