Category: AWS Systems Manager

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 […]

With the upcoming end of support for Microsoft Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 on October 10, 2023, and the ongoing challenges faced by those on Windows Server 2008/2008 R2, many organizations find themselves in a delicate position. Transitioning away from these older versions isn’t always straightforward. Some organizations are running third-party software that is not yet […]

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 you how to use PowerShell to synchronize changes to Microsoft Active Directory (AD) users and groups for federated access to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Introduction Some customers have a well-established Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS) implementation and would like to leverage it for federated access to AWS via […]

This blog post is the second of a four-part series on how to upgrade Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2. The focus of this series is to provide options to handle the upcoming end-of-support event in October. Part 1 overviews the end-of-support dilemma, plus how to perform an in-place, manual upgrade along with an insight […]

This blog post is the first of a four-part series on how to upgrade Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2. The focus of this series is to provide options to handle the upcoming end-of-support event in October. Part 1 overviews the end-of-support dilemma, plus how to perform an in-place, manual upgrade along with an insight […]

In a previous blog post, I showed how you can use AWS Systems Manager Automation to dynamically automate domain join and unjoin activities with Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) for your Windows instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The previous solution showed you how to manually domain join/unjoin activities against single or multiple […]

Automating the process of deploying SQL Server on Amazon EC2 not only simplifies the deployment, but it also gives customers the ability to spin up additional SQL Server instances for additional capacity or spin down instances when not in use to save money. The provisioning of SQL Server is a multi-step process that is outlined in this blog.

A new version of this blog was recently published. The new blog post offers an updated solution to streamline your Active Directory credentials with AWS Secrets Manager. This replaces AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and AWS Lambda function while maintaining the same Automation workflow. In this blog post, I will present a solution for managing […]

In this blog, we will provide a holistic approach to help customers manage their Windows Server infrastructure securely and at scale for both cloud-only and hybrid cloud using AWS services. This approach helps our customers use more efficient, unified, and automated operational solutions for managing server infrastructure. Cloud innovations have opened new possibilities for enterprise […]