Microsoft Workloads on AWS

In this blog post, we will demonstrate how to migrate a Microsoft SQL Server database on a low bandwidth network using AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN), AWS Snowcone, and SQL Server Log Shipping technology. Customers use different migration strategies to lift-and-shift their on-premises SQL Server workloads to the AWS Cloud. One of those approaches […]

“We couldn’t afford to stay on our database platform. But we couldn’t afford the expense of modernizing our data tier either.” This is what Handerson Dutra, Senior Data Architect at Caylent, an AWS Partner, shared with us in a recent conversation about database modernization. “This is a common conundrum with our customers” he added. We […]

In this blog post, we will look at how to automate the rotation of the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) credentials synchronized with Microsoft SQL Server credentials to meet password rotation requirements. Solution overview The IAM Access key and Secret access key are used to create a SQL Server credential; therefore, to rotate the […]

Celebrating 15 years of running Microsoft workloads in the cloud, longer than any other major cloud provider Before we wrap up 2023, I wanted to capture some of the highlights of the year—so I reached out to my esteemed colleague, Rajesh Rathod. Rajesh is an Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) product leader who has […]

In this blog post, we will show you how to downgrade Microsoft SQL Server instances from Enterprise edition to Developer edition on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. This post is especially useful if there are a single digit number of SQL Server instances to be downgraded. In our next blog post, we will […]

In this blog post, we will cover how to containerize and deploy an ASP.NET application running on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for Microsoft Windows Server instance to Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate using AWS Migration Hub Orchestrator.

In this blog post, you will learn how to use custom attributes for Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly known as Azure Active Directory) as the single sign-on (SSO) identity provider integrated with AWS IAM Identity Center (formerly known as AWS SSO). ABAC allows you to control access or fine-grained permissions to […]

In this blog post, I will guide you through the procedure necessary to prepare your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) workloads to receive Extended Security Updates (ESU) purchased from Microsoft. This is achieved by utilizing the Patch Manager and Run Command capabilities of AWS Systems Manager. Windows Server users are familiar with Microsoft’s regular […]

In this blog post, I will explain how to utilize Group Policy Objects (GPOs) to configure Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to use the Amazon Time Sync Service for time synchronization. Additionally, I will explain how to monitor and alert on the time synchronization health of the domain with Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Simple Notification Service. […]

In this blog post, we will review advantages and disadvantages of the two storage access protocols, iSCSI and SMB, offered by Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSx for ONTAP). For comparison purposes, we will use Microsoft SQL Server on Windows. We will provide recommendations for selecting the optimal storage access protocol for your specific scenario. […]