Microsoft Workloads on AWS

The proven, reliable, secure cloud for Windows
Customers have been running Microsoft Workloads on AWS for over 16 years, longer than any other cloud provider. Customers choose AWS because we have the most experience with Microsoft applications in the cloud and we offer the best platform for Windows Server and SQL Server for higher performance and reliability, greater security and identity services, more migration support, the broadest and deepest capabilities, lower total cost of ownership, and flexible licensing options. AWS supports everything you need to build and run Windows applications including Active Directory, .NET, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows desktop-as-a-service, and all supported versions of Windows Server. With our proven expertise, we can help you easily lift-and-shift, refactor, or even modernize your Windows workloads.

Learn What's New with Microsoft Workloads on AWS.

Migrate your Windows Workloads to AWS

Why Microsoft Workloads on AWS

2x

higher performance for a SQL Server workload than the next largest cloud provider*

2x

more regions with multiple availability zones than the next largest cloud provider

5x

more services offering encryption than the next largest cloud provider

36%

savings using AWS over three years, by right-sizing instances with Migration Evaluator
Higher reliability and performance

AWS has the broadest global infrastructure with 77 Availability Zones (AZ) across 24 regions and 99.99% availability for each Amazon EC2 region. By moving your Microsoft workloads to AWS, customers can realize a 98% reduction in unplanned downtime, 71% faster deployment, and 26% higher developer productivity, per IDC. AWS also delivered 2x better performance and 62% lower cost for a SQL Server workload on an EC2 R5b.8xlarge instance when directly tested against the next largest cloud provider, per Principled Technologies.

Greater security and identity services

AWS offers 230 security, compliance, and governance services and features, 5x more services than the next largest cloud provider. With the AWS Nitro System, the underlying platform for EC2 instances, virtualization functions are offloaded to dedicated hardware and software resulting in a minimized attack surface. The Nitro Security chip continuously monitors, protects, and verifies the instance hardware and firmware. We offer AWS Managed Active Directory securely in the cloud eliminating the need for you to synchronize or replicate data from your existing Active Directory during migrations. With AWS Identity Services, you can also manage identities and permissions at scale, while providing flexible options for where and how you manage your employee, partner, and customer information.  

More migration experience

AWS has unmatched experience helping millions of organizations reach their migration goals faster through unique tools and services. With AWS Database Migration Service, we’ve migrated over 900,000 databases and we can help you quickly and securely migrate, while minimizing downtime to applications. The AWS End-of-Support Migration Program can migrate legacy Windows Server applications to the latest, supported versions of Windows Server on AWS. The AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for Windows provides best practices, tools and incentives to reduce the complexity and cost of migrating to the cloud with support from AWS Partners and Professional Services.

Broadest and deepest capabilities

AWS offers over 350 Amazon EC2 instances where comparable services are simply not available from other cloud providers. We provide the only fully managed services for native-Windows file system with Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and for Kubernetes on Windows with Amazon EKS, enabling you to simplify management overhead and reduce costs. Amazon Elastic Block Store offers 99.999% availability, 99.999% durability, and performant block storage for your most demanding SQL Server deployments. Customers also choose AWS for the best and most consistent networking performance for Microsoft applications, delivering 3x more throughput and 25% lower latency than the next cloud provider. 

Lower TCO

Customers can accelerate growth, drive efficiencies, and realize long-term cost reductions running Windows on AWS. Customers can reduce 5-year cost of operations by 56% and gain 37% lower infrastructure costs, per IDC. AWS also offers customers more ways to save through unique pricing models such as Savings Plans, which provide you with savings up to 72% on Amazon EC2 instances, and Amazon EC2 Spot, which reduces costs by up to 90% on compute instances for fault tolerant workloads. 

Flexible licensing options

We offer the most options in the cloud for using new and existing Microsoft software licenses on AWS. By purchasing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) license-included instances, you get new, fully compliant SQL Server licenses from AWS. You can bring your existing licenses to AWS with Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts, Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances, or EC2 instances with default tenancy using Microsoft License Mobility through Software Assurance. AWS License Manager makes it easier to track the usage of software licenses and reduce the risk of non-compliance. 

Estimate cost savings from migrating or modernizing Microsoft workloads to AWS

The AWS Pricing Calculator helps you estimate your total cost of ownership for running Microsoft workloads on AWS based on service configurations you need for your business. You can include pricing for support costs, Dedicated Hosts on EC2, RDS for SQL Server cost modeling, and flexible pricing options such as Savings Plans in your estimate.

Get started »

Learn more on AWS Pricing Calculator

Achieve better price-performance for your SQL Server workloads

You can gain better performance at lower cost for your SQL Server workloads on AWS. A recent benchmark by Principled Technologies showed that an EC2 R5b.8xlarge instance delivered 2x the performance & 62% cost savings for a SQL Server workload, when directly tested against the next largest cloud provider.

Read the blog »

How AWS helps you migrate and modernize Microsoft workloads

  • Assess your cloud readiness before you migrate
  • AWS can help you assess your readiness to move to cloud. With AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (AWS OLA), you can make data-driven migration decisions based on actual resource utilization, third-party licensing, and application dependencies. AWS OLA provides right-sized and licensing-optimized instance recommendations for your on-premises Windows workloads, including opportunities for Reserved Instances, optimized CPUs, Dedicated Hosts, and Microsoft BYOL options.

  • Migrate with AWS programs
  • Customers looking to migrate Windows Server and SQL Server workloads with AWS can take advantage of AWS programs for Windows migration. With our APN Partner and Professional Services teams, AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for Windows provides services, best practices, and tools to help our customers save costs and accelerate your migrations on AWS. The AWS End-of-Support Migration Program (EMP) for Windows Server includes technology and expert guidance to migrate your legacy applications from Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, and 2012 R2 to newer, supported versions on AWS, without any refactoring.

  • Optimize Microsoft workloads after you migrate
  • After moving your Windows workloads onto AWS, you can continue optimizing your costs, usage, and licenses to suit your business needs. With AWS Cost Explorer, you can visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time to take control of spend. AWS Compute Optimizer recommends optimal AWS Compute resources for your workloads so that you can reduce costs up to 25% by analyzing historical utilization data. AWS Managed Services can help operate your cloud environment post-migration by analyzing alerts and responding to incidents, reducing operational overhead and risk. You can use AWS Systems Manager to automate operational tasks across your AWS resources and better manage your infrastructure at scale.

    AWS can also help you modernize your Windows-based applications with AWS open source services when you’re ready to break free from the high costs of commercial licensing. We offer the widest range of options to include running SQL Server database applications on EC2 Linux, moving workloads to Amazon Aurora, containerizing your Windows applications with Amazon EKS, going serverless with AWS Lambda, or leveraging a micro-services based architecture.

The first and only fully managed, native-Windows file system

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed, highly reliable, and scalable file storage that is accessible over the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. Built on Windows Server, Amazon FSx offers the lowest cost file storage in the cloud for Windows applications and workloads.

Learn more » 

Easy to use, high-performance block storage for SQL Server

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) with new Amazon EC2 R5b instances provides easy to use, high-performance block storage for Microsoft SQL Server. Benefit from the highest block storage performance with a single storage volume using io2 Block Express (Preview) and EC2 R5b. Other SSD-backed EBS options include io2 volumes for business-critical applications and gp3 volumes for general purpose applications. Amazon EBS also offers crash-consistent snapshots and enables application consistent snapshots through Windows VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Services) to help protect your SQL Server deployments.

Learn more »

Microsoft on AWS services

Windows on AWS
Service description
AWS service
Windows Server
Secure and resizable compute capacity (virtual servers) in the cloud for Windows instances
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Windows on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Secure and resizable compute capacity (virtual servers) in the cloud for Windows instances

Use eligible software licenses from vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle on Amazon EC2
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Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts

Use eligible software licenses from vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle on Amazon EC2

Databases
Secure and resizable compute capacity (virtual servers) in the cloud for SQL Server instances
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SQL Server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Secure and resizable compute capacity (virtual servers) in the cloud for SQL Server instances

Fully managed relational database service that offers SQL Server
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Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for SQL Server

Fully managed relational database service that offers SQL Server

Fully managed MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database
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Amazon Aurora

Fully managed MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database

Storage
Fully managed native-Microsoft Windows storage
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Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

Fully managed native-Microsoft Windows storage

High performance block storage to attach volumes to SQL Server instances
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Amazon Elastic Block Store


High performance block storage to attach volumes to SQL Server instances

Migration
Automate and accelerate application migration to reduce time and effort
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Migration

Automate and accelerate application migration to reduce time and effort

License management
Central license management service for AWS and on-premises environments
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AWS License Manager

Central license management service for AWS and on-premises environments

Windows-based services
Managed Microsoft Active Directory with identity and access management
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AWS Directory Service

Managed Microsoft Active Directory with identity and access management

Scalable Windows desktop-as-a-service solution
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Desktop-as-a-service

Scalable Windows desktop-as-a-service solution

Edge and hybrid
Run AWS infrastructure and services on premises, including Windows, for a truly consistent hybrid experience
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AWS Outposts

Run AWS infrastructure and services on premises, including Windows, for a truly consistent hybrid experience

Rapidly extend, migrate, and secure your VMware-based Windows workloads to the AWS cloud
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VMware Cloud on AWS

Rapidly extend, migrate, and secure your VMware-based Windows workloads to the AWS cloud

Containers
Highly secure, reliable, and scalable way to run containers
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Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)

Run and manage Docker containers.

Run containers on customer-managed infrastructure
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Amazon ECS Anywhere

Run containers on customer-managed infrastructure

Easily store, manage, and deploy Windows container images
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Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)

Easily store, manage, and deploy Windows container images

Fully managed Kubernetes service
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Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Fully managed Kubernetes service for Windows

Serverless compute orchestration
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AWS Fargate

Serverless compute orchestration for Windows containers

.NET on AWS
Extension for Microsoft Visual Studio to develop, debug, and deploy .NET applications
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AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio

Extension for Microsoft Visual Studio to develop, debug, and deploy .NET applications

Microsoft on AWS services

Category Service descriptions AWS service
Windows Server Secure and resizable compute capacity (virtual servers) in the cloud for Windows instances  Windows on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Use eligible software licenses from vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle on Amazon EC2 Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts
Databases Secure and resizable compute capacity (virtual servers) in the cloud for SQL Server instances 
SQL Server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Fully managed relational database service that offers SQL Server  Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for SQL Server
Fully managed MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database Amazon Aurora
Storage Fully managed native-Microsoft Windows storage Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
High performance block storage to attach volumes to SQL Server instances Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
License management Central license management service for AWS and on-premises environments AWS License Manager
Migration Automate and accelerate application migration to reduce time and effort Migration Hub Orchestrator
Windows-based services Managed Microsoft Active Directory with identity and access management AWS Directory Service
Scalable desktop-as-a-service solution Desktop-as-a-service
Edge and hybrid Run AWS infrastructure and services on premises, including Windows, for a truly consistent hybrid experience AWS Outposts
Rapidly extend, migrate, and secure your VMWare-based Windows workloads to the AWS cloud VMWare Cloud on AWS
Containers Highly secure, reliable, and scalable way to run Windows containers Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
Run containers on customer-managed infrastructure Amazon ECS Anywhere
Fully managed Kubernetes service for Windows Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Easily store, manage, and deploy Windows container images Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) 
.NET on AWS Extension for Microsoft Visual Studio to develop, debug, and deploy .NET applications AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio