Microsoft Workloads on AWS

In this blog post, we will explore a new feature for AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA), Connector for Active Directory, that can help you more easily provision certificates for users and machines within your Microsoft Active Directory (AD) environment with just a few clicks. AWS Private CA can accelerate your provisioning and reduce […]

In this blog post, we introduce a strategy for scaling Microsoft SQL Server deployments on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that uses Amazon FSx, a service that provides fully managed, high-performance file systems in the cloud. This strategy increases SQL Server performance on AWS, providing 2 to 3 times as many Transactions per Minute (TPM) as […]

In this blog post, we will show you how to use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling with your self-hosted Amazon EC2 Azure Pipelines agents to deploy applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS) using Azure DevOps. Introduction There are many ways that you can build and deploy your applications to AWS. You can […]

In this blog post, we will walk you through the steps required to deploy a SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster (FCI) using AWS Launch Wizard, with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP providing you with a shared storage solution. Introduction In our previous blog post, we described how to set up SQL Server FCI with […]

In this blog post, we are going to explore in depth how AWS Migration Hub Strategy Recommendations analyzes your environment, what aspects it analyzes, and how to get the most out of the resulting anti-pattern reports. Introduction Strategy Recommendations analyzes, based upon your business objectives, server inventory, runtime environments, running applications, and databases to identify viable […]

In this blog post, I will show how you can leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) for disaster recovery (DR) for your self-managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD). I will also provide an automated solution to help you run on-demand, periodic DR tests of your AD infrastructure as part of your larger business continuity strategy. Introduction Most […]

In this blog post, we will share the challenges faced and lessons learned from modernizing a Windows Communication Framework (WCF) service to CoreWCF for a SaaS-based company. CoreWCF is a port of server side of WCF to .NET Core. It is an open source project that is supported by Microsoft. This project has significant contributions […]

In this blog post, I will show you how to use AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Automation to keep a service account’s password synchronized in Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and a Secret in AWS Secrets Manager encrypted with an AWS Key Management Service (KMS) customer managed key (CMK). This blog post uses AWS Secrets Manager, but […]

In this blog post, I will show you how to use PowerShell to synchronize changes to Microsoft Active Directory (AD) users and groups for federated access to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Introduction Some customers have a well-established Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS) implementation and would like to leverage it for federated access to AWS via […]

In this blog post, I will show how to move Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server deployments from AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AWS Managed Microsoft AD) to your self-managed Microsoft AD. This blog post is not saying you should move away from AWS Managed Microsoft AD to self-manged AD. Keep […]