Microsoft Workloads on AWS

In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to configure your Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to give separate teams administrative control over each individual Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. I was working with a customer that deployed Amazon FSx for Windows File Server with AWS […]

Many Windows-based applications are .NET applications. They use SQL Server in the backend to retrieve and persist data. Often in the journey to the cloud, a rehost decision is made for such a solution using a simple lift-and-shift approach. When such applications are hosted on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Windows platform, native […]

Modern data security strategies require enforcing multiple security controls – including encryption, end-user access control, monitoring, and auditing – to meet internal security policies and compliance goals. Automating the configuration and enforcement of these controls not only reduces the risk of human error and mismanagement, but also reduces management cost and overhead, especially for complex […]

Introduction AWS customers running Microsoft Windows Server instances face long wait times while provisioning instances, as the Windows Server operating system (OS) goes through a lengthy boot process. For developers and IT professionals, this can make it difficult to support deployment time and system capacity service level agreements (SLAs). When meeting highly-demanding SLAs for mission-critical […]

Challenge Microsoft Exchange is a storage-heavy application, so storage may become cost prohibitive for new deployments. Solid state drives and faster spinning disks are still costly options when multiple copies of the same data needs to be replicated across the global infrastructure. Storage costs have made offerings like Microsoft Office 365 an enticing alternative. In […]

In highly-regulated industries, such as financial services, in-country data residency requirements can often challenge cloud adoption, especially in countries without an AWS Region. In such a case, AWS Outposts could be a good solution to achieve durability and availability whilst complying with in-country data requirements. Outposts, which provides a pool of compute and storage capacity […]

Migrating a Microsoft Azure SQL database typically requires using database tools to extract data from the Azure SQL database, making necessary schema changes on the target database, and then importing the data into the target database. This usually involves manual steps and extended periods of downtime to the source applications. What if there was a […]

Many AWS GovCloud (US) customers and their partners use AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild to build Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines on AWS. Building on AWS GovCloud (US), however, introduces a few restrictions, not present in other AWS Regions, when implementing pipelines for Windows container applications. In this blog post, I will explain what these […]

Traditional disaster recovery methods for Microsoft SQL Server require duplication of infrastructure, operating systems, licensing and other third-party applications, rendering it a highly expensive IT project – even prohibitively expensive for some organizations. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) provides organizations with a more modern approach to protecting Microsoft SQL Server environments: cloud-based disaster recovery […]

In AWS, customers are running their most mission-critical workloads on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with Windows as their compute layer. Some applications have requirements for low latency access to on-premises systems or data processing locally due to data residency requirements or local system dependencies. These requirements might be a roadblock for the ongoing […]