What’s new in Microsoft SQL Server 2025 on AWS

As enterprises of all sizes accelerate their cloud transformation journeys, running Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon Web Services (AWS) has emerged as a strategic choice for mission-critical database workloads, with AWS emerging as a lead cloud provider for SQL Server users. Whether deploying SQL Server on Amazon EC2 instances for maximum control and customization, or leveraging the managed database capabilities of Amazon RDS for SQL Server to reduce administrative overhead, AWS offers flexible options that align with diverse business needs.

Microsoft released SQL Server 2025 for general availability on November 18th 2025, with features and enhancements that improve database backups and availability, optimized database operations and performance, and developer experience.

You can now deploy and run SQL Server 2025 on AWS, leveraging the new features and enhancements of SQL Server 2025, while continuing to take advantage the benefits of AWS such as improved performance, simplified management, and reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Deploy SQL Server on AWS and bring your own license (BYOL) to maximize existing investments or leverage the pay-as-you-go, license-included (LI) AWS provided SQL Server 2025 Amazon Machine Image (AMI) option to eliminate the hassle of managing license compliance.

SQL Server Editions and feature updates

SQL Server 2025 includes Standard Developer and Enterprise Developer editions to support application development and testing in non-production environments without requiring Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) licensing. These editions enable developers to build and test applications in an environment that feature match their corresponding paid editions, eliminating SQL Server licensing cost in non-production environments. AWS customers can leverage AWS automation or AWS Launch Wizard for SQL Server development edition to deploy SQL Server Developer edition on EC2.To continue to drive down the Total Cost of Ownership in these environments, consider deploying your SQL Server 2025 development environments on AWS running on Linux or Docker containers, eliminating Windows licensing cost.

SQL Server 2025 Standard edition increased its resource limits to support up to 32 CPU cores and 256GB RAM. When deploying your SQL Server 2025 Standard edition databases on EC2, you should consider a Memory Optimized EC2 instance, such as a r8i.8xlarge instance providing 32 vCPU and 256GB RAM; matching the edition resource limitations. Resource Governor, once only available in Enterprise edition, is now also available in Standard edition. Resource Governor allows DBAs to limit CPU, Memory, IOPS, number of running request, etc. for a specific workload, enabling safeguards against runaway workloads.

SQL Server Web edition, used by Web hosters, has been removed from the SQL Server 2025 edition catalogue.

Database Backup and Availability Improvements

With SQL Server 2025, you can run your SQL Server database backups (full, differential, and transaction log), from a secondary replica in your Always On Availability Groups. This helps offload storage, CPU, and network performance from the primary database host to a secondary host, reallocating database maintenance resources, and allowing it to be used by application queries. SQL Server 2025 also includes a new, more efficient, ZSTD backup compression algorithm compared to the default MS_XPRESS algorithm, increasing compression and minimizing backup storage footprint. Combining these new features with SQL Server native backup to Amazon S3, released in SQL Server 2022, you can build a robust backup strategy on AWS to support your database backup and restore requirements including local recovery, environment refreshes, compliance archival with Amazon S3 Glacier, ransomware protection with Amazon S3 Object lock, storage based snapshots for quick recovery with Amazon EBS snapshots, copying native backups “offsite” for remote recovery via S3 Cross-Region Replication, etc.

If you are leveraging Distributed Availability Groups (DAG) in SQL Server 2025 you can see improved synchronization performance, by reducing network saturation, when the forwarder replica is in asynchronous commit mode. Distributed Availability Groups can now be replaced with distributed contained availability groups, allowing the master and msdb system databases to be in a contained DAG. This simplifies management by automatically replicating server-level objects between nodes, including logins and SQL Agent jobs. Customers frequently use Availability Groups and Distributed Availability Groups to migrate from on-premise to EC2 on AWS, between multiple regions within AWS, or leverage AWS as a DR site for their on-premise databases. SQL Server 2025 distributed availability groups can help improve networking performance and ease operational burden for customers migrating to AWS or failing over between environments.

Optimized Database Operations and Performance

If you are offloading your application read-only workloads to Always On Availability Groups readable secondaries running on SQL Server 2025, you will find new beneficial Query Store enhancements, improving performance consistency. Query Store for readable secondaries are enabled by default in SQL Server 2025 providing more predictable query performance. Previously, temporary statistics were created on readable secondaries, but with SQL Server 2025 it is now sent back to the primary, persisted in the primary database, and sent back to the secondaries. This allows application read-only queries, executed against one secondary database host, to be distributed to all secondaries, providing consistent query performance across all read-only secondaries and the primary database. As you scale out your SQL Server on AWS readable secondaries, which might require different CPU and memory configurations compared to your primary database, you can optimize your EC2 instance selection by leveraging Optimize CPU. This feature allows you to customize the number of vCPUs and/or disable hyperthreading of an instance’s CPU options to optimize the licensing costs of Microsoft Windows and SQL Server core-based licensing. Review the Optimize CPU best practices for SQL Server workloads original and continued blogs for detailed performance and price/performance analysis.

Database Administrators understand the importance of deploying tempdb according to best practice to increase performance and reduce tempdb contention. Customers running SQL Server on AWS typically leverage Amazon EC2 instances with non-volatile memory express (NVMe) solid state drives (SSD) instance store volumes, to increase tempdb performance and isolate tempdb from runaway workloads. AWS provides a variety of SQL Server settings to reduce tempdb contention and optimize tempdb query performance in the Best practices for deploying SQL Server on Amazon EC2 prescriptive guidance. A new SQL Server 2025 feature is Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR) in tempdb which provides “instantaneous transaction rollback” and “aggressive log truncation”, allowing faster transaction rollback and reducing the chances of running out of tempdb transaction log space. Resource Governor can also be used with SQL Server 2025 to enforce the amount of spaced used in tempdb by a specific workload group. This can prevent runaway workloads from consuming excessive tempdb space, causing performance issues and a potential outage.

Developer Experience

SQL Server 2025 enhances its capabilities for integrating with external services, including REST/GraphQL endpoints and various AI services, through the stored procedure sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint. Using standard REST APIs, you can connect your SQL Server databases directly to AWS services without complex coding. This means you can use familiar SQL Server features alongside powerful AWS capabilities like Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SQS, and Amazon EventBridge to only name a few. The sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint stored procedure payload can be formatted in JSON, XML, or TEXT and return payload can be up to 100MB in size. Query Amazon Bedrock AI models right from your database and unlock enhance data analysis, automate content generation, and scalable AI processing. If external rest endpoint is enabled, ensure proper access controls are configured to mitigate the risk of unauthorized access or transfer of data.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), usually used to support on-premises reporting services, is is being replaced by Power BI Report Server starting with SQL Server 2025. Power BI Report Server offers a superset of features compared to SSRS. It can host traditional paginated reports (.rdl) like SSRS but also supports interactive Power BI reports (.pbix) and Excel files. SQL Server 2025 Power BI Report Server can be installed, configured, and migrated from on-premises SSRS to AWS EC2, taking advantage of the performance, security, and elasticity of AWS. Per Microsoft’s Product Terms, customers bringing their own SQL Server Enterprise Core or Standard Core licenses for SQL Server 2025 can deploy Power BI Report Server on a maximum number of vCPUs equal to the number of vCPUs they have licensed for SQL Server, subject to a licensing minimum of 4 cores or vCPUs. A Power BI Pro User SL is required to publish shared Power BI reports using the Power BI Report Server. Amazon EC2 provides a wide selection of instance types optimized to fit different use cases. EC2 instance types comprise a varying combination of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capabilities. Leverage the balance of compute and memory of a General Purposes EC2 instance type to run your Power BI Report Server, while the reporting and source SQL Server databases run on a Memory Optimized EC2 instance designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory. For additional EC2 instance selection recommendations, use the AWS EC2 instance type finder.

Conclusion

SQL Server customers continue to pick AWS as their cloud provider to migrate, operate, and modernize their SQL Server workloads because of our flexible options. With SQL Server 2025, you now have access to new features and enhancements including increased resources for Standard edition, Standard Developer edition, invoke external rest endpoints (AWS services) via TSQL, support for Power Bi Report Server, native database backups on secondary nodes to Amazon S3, distributed contained availability groups, improved tempdb performance, and more consistent query performance on all readable secondary databases via Query Store and persistent statistics.

If you’re currently evaluating upgrading, migrating, or modernizing your SQL Server workloads, including SQL Server 2025, please contact us. We’d be happy to help you with your SQL Server plans and initiatives.