Microsoft Workloads on AWS

In this post, I will show you how to automate the conversion of Ansible playbooks into EC2 Image Builder components. Automating this conversion is useful for migrations to EC2 Image Builder, where the amount of Ansible playbooks is considerable and manually creating an equivalent AWS Task Orchestrator and Executor (AWSTOE) component for each playbook becomes […]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced the general availability of Microsoft Office, along with Remote Desktop Service Subscriber Access License (RDS SAL), as license included offerings on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Empowering employees to work from anywhere with many different devices is at the core of many of our customers’ IT strategy. […]

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 […]

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 […]

Customers running SQL Server on AWS have enjoyed running their workloads with higher reliability and performance, lowered total cost of ownership (TCO), flexible licensing options, and using the broad and deep capabilities of AWS, all while leveraging greater security and identity services. Microsoft released SQL Server 2022 for general availability (GA) on November 16th 2022, […]

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. Update: We have recently published a new blog on how to […]

This year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced AWS Migration Hub Orchestrator, a feature which provides customized migration templates with a predefined set of migration tasks, migration tools, and automation features. Moreover, it allows customers to track their migration progress in one place. From a SQL Server migration perspective, customers often run into challenges, like not […]

AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET is an assistive tool that simplifies refactoring monolithic .NET applications into independent microservices. AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET helps extract source code segments as microservices or shared libraries from legacy ASP.NET based applications, and ports those directly to modern cross-platform .NET. This new capability of extract and port workflow now enables developers […]

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 […]

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 […]