Category: Advanced (300)

In this blog post, I will guide you through the procedure necessary to prepare your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) workloads to receive Extended Security Updates (ESU) purchased from Microsoft. This is achieved by utilizing the Patch Manager and Run Command capabilities of AWS Systems Manager. Windows Server users are familiar with Microsoft’s regular […]

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. […]

In this blog post, we will review advantages and disadvantages of the two storage access protocols, iSCSI and SMB, offered by Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSx for ONTAP). For comparison purposes, we will use Microsoft SQL Server on Windows. We will provide recommendations for selecting the optimal storage access protocol for your specific scenario. […]

Introducing the Cloud Intelligence Dashboard for Azure. Enhance cloud cost monitoring with Amazon QuickSight by integrating Microsoft Azure usage data.

Our customers tell us they want a reliable way to copy data from Azure Blob Storage to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Sometimes data needs to be moved just once, like during a migration. While other times, it needs to be copied continuously, like in a data pipeline. What’s common amongst these requests is […]

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, 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 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 […]