Microsoft Workloads on AWS

This post is co-written with Danny Teller from Tipalti. Tipalti is a global payables automation platform processing billions of dollars annually for thousands of customers worldwide. The platform handles complex payment workflows requiring high availability, data integrity, and rapid scaling during peak processing periods. This blog post will show you how Tipalti modernized a legacy […]

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 […]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced license asset groups as a new feature for AWS License Manager to help you track license usage in a single AWS account or across different AWS accounts and regions in your AWS Organization. In our previous blog post, we explained how you can utilize license asset groups to build […]

Introduction We recently announced that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server supports Microsoft SQL Server Developer Edition using your own installation media through the custom engine version (CEV) feature. This capability enables you to use SQL Server Developer Edition in development and testing environments without incurring additional licensing costs, while benefiting from […]

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. […]

In today’s hybrid IT landscape, many organizations are strategically moving their infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) while maintaining certain on-premises services. Microsoft Exchange Server remains a critical communication platform for businesses and deploying it in AWS provides excellent opportunities to leverage cloud scalability and reliability. Whether you’re migrating an existing Exchange infrastructure or implementing […]

In today’s fast-paced cloud transformation landscape, organizations face the critical challenge of modernizing their legacy Microsoft .NET applications efficiently while minimizing risk and maximizing return on investment. Many customers are turning to containerization, often starting with Linux containers to modernize applications built on .NET Core or other cross-platform frameworks. However, legacy .NET Framework applications often […]

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 […]