Microsoft Workloads on AWS

Tag: Active Directory

How to generate TLS certificates for a highly available Remote Desktop Gateway Farm

Introduction In this blog post, I am going to show you how to generate, import, test, and troubleshoot a properly created Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate for a Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) farm. Secure management of your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for Microsoft Windows Server is a top priority for any […]

Configure Microsoft Active Directory to use Amazon Time Sync

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. […]

How to simplify certificate provisioning in Active Directory with AWS Private Certificate Authority

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 […]

Automate disaster recovery for your self-managed Active Directory on AWS

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 […]

Rotate Active Directory credentials stored in AWS Secrets Manager

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 […]

Switching Amazon RDS for SQL Server from AWS Managed Microsoft AD to self-managed AD

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 […]

Automate Active Directory domain join activities at scale with AWS Systems Manager

In a previous blog post, I showed how you can use AWS Systems Manager Automation to dynamically automate domain join and unjoin activities with Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) for your Windows instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The previous solution showed you how to manually domain join/unjoin activities against single or multiple […]

Simplifying Active Directory domain join with AWS Systems Manager

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 […]

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and AWS Managed Microsoft AD Multi-Administrator Deployment

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 […]