Microsoft Workloads on AWS

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 […]

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.

In this blog post, we provide a tutorial to containerize your ASP.NET Core applications to Linux containers and migrate to AWS using AWS App2Container (A2C). AWS App2Container is a command-line tool for modernizing .NET and Java applications into containerized applications. Customers modernize their legacy ASP.NET applications to ASP.NET Core to take advantage of the performance, cost savings, […]

Learn how to leverage AWS Auto Scaling’s Lifecycle Hooks and Warm Pools to scale Microsoft Windows Server instances quickly as demand increases.

In this blog post, I will present a solution for managing the Active Directory domain membership for a dynamic fleet of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Windows instances using Automation, a capability of AWS Systems Manager. Using Systems Manager Automation, you can dynamically automate domain join and unjoin activities with Microsoft Active Directory Domain […]

AWS recently announced the general availability of license-included Visual Studio software on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.
This offering is made possible by the new user-based subscriptions feature of AWS License Manager. Let’s review steps needed to set up your license-included Visual Studio software on an Amazon EC2 instance.

The high cost of Microsoft licenses for SQL Server, especially SQL Server Enterprise edition, is a point of concern for many customers planning their migration of SQL Server workloads to AWS. In this blog post, I will discuss 10 things you can do to save money with your SQL Server workloads on AWS. You have […]

Software development engineers invest thought and effort into optimizing the performance of the applications they build, often using strategies such as caching frequently used data, moving code closer to the users, optimizing code, optimizing data access and disk I/O, and response compression. In this blog post, we explore one such optimization – caching in ASP.NET […]

Do you maintain a Windows 11 VM image on-premises? Windows 11 sets new hardware requirements for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0, and Secure Boot support. Using the UEFI boot mode and NitroTPM, launching Windows 11 is now supported on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). You can reduce your time […]

Software licensing costs matter. Evolve Cloud Services, an AWS Partner who specializes in cloud and software licensing optimization, knows this full well. Recently, Evolve teamed up with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG)—an IT analyst, research, validation, and strategy firm—to analyze the results of 300 extensive Optimization and License Assessments conducted for organizations wanting to migrate their […]