Overview

The SQL Server Amazon Machine Images (AMI) is built, updated, and fully-patched by AWS within five business days of Microsoft's patch Tuesday (the second Tuesday of each month). Launching an instance from this AMI enables you to run the instance as a database server and saves you the effort to install SQL Server software. This AMI comes with following software and drivers including AWS Systems Manager, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell, Network drivers, and Storage drivers.

You can use AWS Launch Wizard to easily size, configure, and deploy SQL Server applications on AWS. Launch Wizard for SQL Server supports both single instance and high availability deployments according to AWS and SQL Server best practices.

Highlights

Built, updated, and fully-patched by AWS for SQL Server running on EC2.
Preinstalled with AWS Systems Manager, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell, and various drivers to make your management easier.
Accelerate SQL Server single instance and high availability deployments with AWS Launch Wizard.

Details

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Pricing

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Express on Windows Server 2016

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This product is free. Subscriptions have no end date and can be canceled anytime.

Additional AWS infrastructure costs may apply. Use the AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate your infrastructure costs.

Additional AWS infrastructure costs

Type	Cost
EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes	$0.10/per GB/month of provisioned storage

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Usage information

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Delivery details

64-bit (x86) Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

An AMI is a virtual image that provides the information required to launch an instance. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances are virtual servers on which you can run your applications and workloads, offering varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources. You can launch as many instances from as many different AMIs as you need.

Version release notes

Changes:

AWSPowerShell v4.1.694
AWS NVMe v1.6.0
cfn-init v2.0.31
EC2 Launch v1.3.2005065
SSM v3.3.1230.0
Windows Security Updates current to November 12th 2024

Additional details

Usage instructions

Please visit this following page for more information on using Windows: http://thinkwithwp.com/windows/

Resources

Vendor resources

SQL Server on AWS

Best Practices for Deploying SQL Server on AWS

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Ratings and reviews

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2 external reviews

External reviews are sourced from G2 and are not included in the star rating for this product.

David W.

Light version of a robust, reliable database engine on a secure, modern operating system

Reviewed on Mar 15, 2022

Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?

I've always loved Microsoft SQL Server, and for .NET developers it is an excellent choice of database engine. The Express version is the lightest form but can still be managed through SSMS, however is more license-friendly and this combination - SQL Server 2016 Express on Windows Server 2016 - makes a lot of sense for a data-driven website platform, for example. You can host it outside your organisation and know your .NET apps will run reliably and robustly, your developers and DBAs can work with the data easily, and your licensing costs are reduced. SQL Server 2016 is where Microsoft added a lot of great features like query store and in-memory facilities.

What do you dislike about the product?

On the downside, if you're hosting this product outside your environment and rely on a third-party provider there is, of course, a licensing fee for Windows Server 2016 and SQL Server 2016 Express, compared to open-source options like Linux and MySQL.

Additionally, the way SQL Server Express installs itself can lead to some developers or administrators inadvertently creating database servers like hostname\sqlexpress instead of simply hostname. It's important to be careful when setting it up to ensure you do so in the way you really want.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We used it for our externally-hosted public-facing website. Our website was an in-house app with many facilities to capture customer requests, provide services, etc., with a lot of API-driven components, content management for our marketing team, and other dynamic features. Being a Microsoft / .NET environment this combination of server and DB was ideal for us and for the team who had a lot of SQL Server experience and affection.

Great features out of the box

Reviewed on Mar 08, 2022

Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?

The installation process is very simple. Replication is easy to configure and understand unlike other flavours of SQL. The management tool SSMS is very mature and comes with functionality to help you administrate your clusters.

What do you dislike about the product?

There is nothing to dislike about the product. The one thing to consider though is the pricing, which can be quite expensive for small to medium businesses. It's best to obtain using enterprise agreement with MS.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

On premises to cloud replication has been easier than anticipated using SQL Server 2016. We have found the replication to be very reliable thus far since being setup with not too much maintenance required.