Microsoft Workloads on AWS
Category: AWS Systems Manager
Event-driven Active Directory domain join with Amazon EventBridge
In this blog post, I will show you how Amazon EventBridge can automate Microsoft Active Directory (AD) domain join and unjoin for your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. In a previous blog post, I showed you how AWS Systems Manager Automation can dynamically domain join and unjoin EC2 instances manually. I have worked […]
Accelerate Remote Desktop Gateway deployments with AWS Launch Wizard
Introduction In this blog post, I am going to show you how easy it is to deploy a secure infrastructure to manage your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for Microsoft Windows Server through the automation provided by AWS Launch Wizard. AWS Launch Wizard offers a guided way of sizing, configuring, and deploying AWS […]
Simplifying Active Directory domain join with AWS Systems Manager
In this blog post, I will demonstrate a solution for managing the Active Directory domain membership for a dynamic fleet of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Windows instances using AWS Systems Manager Automation. Using Systems Manager Automation, you can dynamically automate domain join and unjoin activities with Microsoft Active Directory (AD) for your Amazon […]
Use AWS Systems Manager to enable CloudWatch memory metrics for Windows Server Amazon EC2 instances
In this blog post, we will show how to reduce the administrative burden of enabling Amazon CloudWatch memory metric monitoring on Windows Server EC2 instances using AWS Systems Manager automation. Once enabled, we will show how memory monitoring benefits downstream services like AWS Compute Optimizer to provide accurate cost savings recommendations. Monitoring is an important […]
Automate downgrading SQL Server to Developer edition on Amazon EC2
In this blog post, we will show you how to automate the process of downgrading from Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise or Standard edition to SQL Server Developer edition to save cost. Introduction Every day, customers benefit from the cost savings, scalability, performance, and ease of management of running SQL Server on AWS. Deploying SQL Server […]
Monitor Microsoft SharePoint Server using Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights
Introduction In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to configure Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights for a Microsoft SharePoint farm. Management and governance are important aspects of any workload, whether it is running on-premises or in the AWS Cloud. In this context, management refers to performing defined actions, either automated or manual, to make sure […]
Update AWS Tools for PowerShell at scale with AWS Systems Manager
In this blog post, I will show you how to update AWS Tools for PowerShell at scale within your environment by using the AWS Systems Manager Run Command. Manually updating AWS Tools for PowerShell across multiple instances can be time-consuming, inefficient, and error prone. These manual operational efforts typically result in a logistical nightmare, especially […]
Automated user creation and provisioning in Active Directory and Amazon WorkSpaces
For customers that have workloads in the AWS Cloud, a common use case is the provisioning of new user accounts in Active Directory, and subsequently, WorkSpaces for these new users. In this blog post, we will present an efficient and reusable solution to automate the creation, provisioning, and deprovisioning of Microsoft Active Directory (AD) user […]
Accelerate Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling for Microsoft Windows workloads
In this blog post, we will present a sample solution and provide recommendations on how to reduce both the cost and time associated with a Microsoft Windows Server instance joining an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling group up to 78%. Customers using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling often desire faster scale-out times to […]
Automate rotating IAM credentials for SQL Server backups to Amazon S3
In this blog post, we will look at how to automate the rotation of the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) credentials synchronized with Microsoft SQL Server credentials to meet password rotation requirements. Solution overview The IAM Access key and Secret access key are used to create a SQL Server credential; therefore, to rotate the […]