Category: Amazon EC2

When building Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, you often bootstrap them to accomplish basic tasks, like OS/application configuration, domain join, installing software, and configuration at scale. However, as configurations grow more complex, requiring multiple steps such as hostname changes, domain joins, and software installations, relying solely on a single bootstrap method can lead […]

Introduction This blog post shows you how to back up, replicate, and restore the Microsoft SQL Server encryption key hierarchy across AWS Regions. This approach lets encrypted databases recover successfully during cross-region disaster recovery (DR) events on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Cross-region DR planning for SQL Server on Amazon EC2 focuses on database […]

In modern database environments, the ability to quickly restore databases is just as critical as creating reliable backups. An 11-hour database restore window is no longer acceptable in today’s enterprise workloads. Here’s how to cut that to under 10 minutes. In our previous blog, we discussed how to create application consistent snapshot backups for Microsoft SQL […]

Enterprises struggle to integrate AI capabilities into existing applications without costly code changes. Traditional approaches require modifying application layers, updating APIs, and extensive testing cycles—all of which extend time-to-market and increase project risk. This post demonstrates how you can reduce time-to-market by invoking AI agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore directly from Microsoft SQL Server 2025. […]

Update (June 2026): AWS License Manager now automatically recognizes EC2 Image Builder instances using the Ec2ImageBuilderArn and CreatedBy tag keys (with value EC2 Image Builder). This means License Manager skips the domain join and license activation process for Image Builder build instances, eliminating the need for the wait mechanism described in this post. The GitHub […]

Enterprises are under increasing pressure to optimize software licensing costs, maintain vendor compliance, and make data-driven renewal decisions while managing fragmented license data across multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts and regions. Centralizing and governing this license data facilitates cost optimization, audit readiness, and strategic procurement planning. In this blog post, we’ll show you how […]

AWS has helped hundreds of thousands of customers transition their SQL Server workloads to the cloud since 2008, longer than any other cloud provider. Running business-critical applications often requires Microsoft SQL Server databases to be highly available. Customers choosing to use SQL Server for their mission-critical workloads can achieve high availability by deploying SQL Server […]

In this blog post, we will guide you through the process on performing a snapshot backup using native T-SQL based backup abilities and snapshot technology of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN). This method provide near-instant, consistent backups with negligible I/O, storage and compute capacity impact unlike traditional Microsoft SQL Server backups. Introduction Microsoft SQL […]

In this blog, we’ll demonstrate how to architect and implement a high-availability Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) with SQL Server using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) across three Availability Zones (AZs). This approach transcends the traditional two-AZ limitations of Amazon FSx and one-AZ limitation of EBS multi-attach. […]

In this blog, we’re going to show you how AWS License Manager can leverage the directory sharing feature available from AWS Directory Services for AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory (AWS Managed Microsoft AD) to centrally manage user subscriptions services while using multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts. AWS License Manager offers you user-based subscriptions for […]