Category: Compute

January 2024: This post was reviewed and updated for accuracy. Storing user names and passwords directly in applications is not a best practice. Saving credentials as plaintext should never occur in a secure application. As a solution, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies can assign permissions that determine who is allowed to manage Amazon […]

Microsoft SQL Server 2017 supports Always On availability groups between Windows and Linux to create read-scale workloads without high availability (HA). Unfortunately, you cannot achieve HA between Windows and Linux because there is no clustered solution that can manage that cross-platform configuration. To use HA with Always On availability groups, consider using a Windows Server […]

Microservices-based applications architectures are the norm for building scalable applications. AWS makes creating these types of applications easier with Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility). Just bring your code and deploy an application with this fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. You can use the same MongoDB application […]

October 2023: This post was reviewed and updated for accuracy. AWS offers multiple options to host your databases serving OLTP workloads – host your own managed database on Amazon EC2 instances or use Amazon RDS managed by AWS. RDS manages high availability, automated backups, database upgrades, OS patches, security, and read replica. RDS also offers […]

If you still have Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 instances deployed, now is the time to upgrade them. Microsoft end of support (EoS) date for each is almost upon us—July 9, 2019. This means that after that there are no further security updates, which has security and also compliance implications, so don’t wait! Today, I’m excited […]

In this blog post, we explain the deployment of Microsoft SQL Server on containers using Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS). The same approach and principles discussed here also apply to any other stateful application that needs high availability (HA) and durability combined with a reusable and repeatable DevOps practice. Example use cases […]

AWS Auto Scaling can scale your AWS resources up and down dynamically based on their traffic patterns. However, a typical application stack has many resources, and managing the individual AWS Auto Scaling policies for all these resources can be an organizational challenge. With scaling plans, you can automate the creation of AWS Auto Scaling policies […]

In this post, I discuss how to integrate a central Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL database with other systems by streaming its modifications into Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. An earlier post, Streaming Changes in a Database with Amazon Kinesis, described how to integrate a central RDS for MySQL database with other systems […]

When you deploy Microsoft SQL Server on AWS, you have many choices for how to optimize the performance, availability, reliability, and costs of your applications. Amazon offers multiple SQL Server versions, broad compute options, and numerous licensing options to optimize usage and reduce costs. You can choose the pay-as-you-go model and use the AWS license-included […]

A best practice for the deployment of AWS resources is to use a configuration system that treats your infrastructure as code. Infrastructure as code is a key enabler of DevOps practices, which bring developers and operations together to collaborate on automating application delivery at scale. By modeling your entire infrastructure as code in AWS CloudFormation […]