Modernize Windows Workloads
AWS offers a wide range of options to help you modernize your Windows based applications. These include running your SQL Server database applications on EC2 Linux, moving your workloads to Amazon Aurora, containerizing your Windows applications with Amazon EKS, going serverless with AWS Lambda, or leveraging a micro-services based architecture.
Customers are moving away from Windows Server to reduce costs and escape licensing restrictions. Many AWS customers including Visma, Mindtouch, and Axinom are breaking free from licensing constraints and the high costs of Windows Server, shifting to open source technologies with a much higher pace of innovation. This trend is evident from new Linux server deployments accounting for 77% of all worldwide server operating environments deployed in 2020, and it is expected to increase to 82% by 2023 .
When customers modernize their applications with AWS, they benefit from rapid innovation, increased cost savings, improved security and greater flexibility. AWS offers a broad array of tools, services, and programs to help you modernize your Windows workloads. Start your modernization journey with us today.
Migration Acceleration Program for Windows
Get prescriptive guidance, tooling, training, and services credits to migrate and modernize your applications.
Benefits
Rapid Access to More Innovation
With open source technologies, you benefit from community based innovation. This is why containers, CI/CD tools, databases are now almost always Linux first. AWS offers unique services including, the only production support for Kubernetes on Windows, and continues to innovate on open source with new services such as Amazon Aurora and AWS Fargate.
Lower Costs
When you move to open source, you no longer pay for expensive Windows and/or SQL Server licensing. Further, services like Amazon Aurora provide the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. This combined with our flexible pricing models such as EC2 Savings Plan and EC2 Spot allow customers to maximize their overall savings.
Improved Security
Amazon Linux serves as a reference implementation for a cloud-optimized Linux offering with built-in security. Linux implementations reduce the surface area for attacks and vulnerabilities. This combined with the comprehensive set of 210 security, compliance, governance service, and key features from AWS enhances the security of your applications.
More Flexibility
Open source technologies are free from licensing lock-in. You can choose from multiple Linux distributors, such as Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, CentOS, or Amazon Linux, so you can pick the best platform for your workloads. This translates into better agility for your business, while keeping your costs in check.
Improve Performance
AWS Databases allow you to scale your largest and most complex workloads, providing 3-5x the performance of alternatives. Amazon Aurora is up to three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases and even five times faster than standard MySQL databases at 1/10th the cost. AWS Lambda optimizes your code execution time by choosing the right memory size for your function and enables hyper-ready response within double digit milliseconds.
Pathways to modernize
When customers modernize their Windows based workloads with AWS, they can choose from a broad array of pathways and services, including:
SQL Server on EC2 Linux
Customers looking for self-managed way to run SQL Server in a more cost effective way can operate on EC2 Linux, without compromising performance and security. SQL Server on Linux costs less than Windows, and provides a familiar experience to Windows users.
SQL Server to Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.
Windows Containers Support with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)
Amazon EKS is a fully managed Kubernetes service that offers the only production support for Windows containers. With EKS, you can run Windows worker nodes alongside Linux worker nodes, allowing you to use the same cluster for managing applications on either operating system.
.NET Core on Linux Containers
AWS Fargate allows you to run containers without needing to provision, manage, or scale any Amazon EC2 compute infrastructure. Fargate works with Amazon ECS and can run microservices developed in many programming languages or application frameworks, including .NET Core.
Serverless deployment of .NET applications using AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. It is a serverless compute service that runs your code in response to events, and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you, so that you can avoid the heavy-lifting associated with scaling, patching, and managing your .Net applications.
Customer references
SQL to Aurora Migration
.NET Core Migration
Infor achieves substantial monthly cost savings on AWS Aurora
“We needed more agility, and building data centers did not make sense for our customers and the business. We’re running tens of thousands of SQL and Aurora databases on AWS and are seeing substantial savings on our monthly costs.”
- Richard Sharp, Director of Databases, Infor
Xero increases productivity, focuses on improvement on SQL server on Linux
“Running Windows on AWS was a key enabler in our move to AWS in 2015. CloudFormation allowed us to reimagine our existing manual deployment processes entirely in code. More recently AWS System Manager made it even easier to run script for patching in a controlled manner across portions of our Windows fleet. Finally, the stability of the EC2 platform when combined with Autoscaling groups gives us peace of mind around tolerating Availability Zone failure without missing a beat. This allows our teams to focus on improving the application or in some cases transitioning part of the stack to containers. Over the next 3 years, Xero plans to move from a 70% Windows / 30% Linux mix to a 30% Windows / 70% Linux mix of OS. The flexibility of the AWS Platform has been a key enabler in this change.”
- Ben Salt, Executive GM of Reliability, Xero
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Mar 20, 2020