Microsoft Workloads on AWS

Category: AWS Secrets Manager

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 […]

Rotate Active Directory credentials stored in AWS Secrets Manager

In this blog post, I will show you how to use AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Automation to keep a service account’s password synchronized in Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and a Secret in AWS Secrets Manager encrypted with an AWS Key Management Service (KMS) customer managed key (CMK). This blog post uses AWS Secrets Manager, but […]

Synchronize Active Directory users to AWS IAM Identity Center using SCIM and PowerShell

In this blog post, I will show you how to use PowerShell to synchronize changes to Microsoft Active Directory (AD) users and groups for federated access to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Introduction Some customers have a well-established Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS) implementation and would like to leverage it for federated access to AWS via […]

Switching Amazon RDS for SQL Server from AWS Managed Microsoft AD to self-managed AD

In this blog post, I will show how to move Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server deployments from AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AWS Managed Microsoft AD) to your self-managed Microsoft AD. This blog post is not saying you should move away from AWS Managed Microsoft AD to self-manged AD. Keep […]

How to load .NET configuration from AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. It enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve secrets used by your application, eliminating the need to hard-code sensitive information in plain text. You can use the Secrets Manager client to retrieve secrets using AWS SDK for .NET. However, this would require code changes and add to the complexity of your code, as you need to invoke the client whenever you need to read data stored in Secrets Manager. Instead, you can use the .NET configuration system – an extensible API used to read and manage application secrets. This lets developers use a familiar API to access secrets in secure storage and reduce complexity by using a single code path for all environments. Additionally, the provider lets existing applications move to Secrets Manager without making any code changes.