Microsoft Workloads on AWS

How to use the new AWS Modernization Calculator for Microsoft Workloads to estimate modernized architectures

On November 18, 2022, we announced the general availability of the AWS Modernization Calculator for Microsoft Workloads. Using this tool, you can estimate the cost of modernizing your Microsoft workloads to a new architecture that uses open-source software and cloud-based services in the AWS cloud. It enables you to assess the benefits of using technologies […]

How Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts saved 40% with .NET modernization

The Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts (AR-AOC) is an agency within the judicial branch of the Arkansas state government. AR-AOC provides a wide range of administrative, legal, financial, management, program, and information technology services to the state courts on behalf of the Arkansas Supreme Court. In this blog post, we share the story of […]

Datavail: Migrating and modernizing commercial databases to open-source database engines on AWS

Modernizing commercial databases on AWS helps lowers costs by eliminating punitive licensing contracts and helps improve quality, efficiency, and performance. Datavail, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency, has successfully migrated over 200 database workloads from on premises to AWS. They also help customers modernize their migrated workloads to further reduce costs […]

Convert Ansible playbooks for AMI creation into EC2 Image Builder component documents

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 […]

How to set up Microsoft Office on Amazon EC2

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. […]

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 […]

What’s new in SQL Server 2022 on AWS?

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, […]

Using AWS Migration Hub Orchestrator to simplify and accelerate Microsoft SQL Server migrations to AWS

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 […]