Category: Learning Levels

Let’s face it. End of support (EOS) –three words that can unsettle any IT professional– is the last thing you want to hear about for your mission-critical applications. It creates additional work for you to deal with the upgrades and causes downtime for your end users. The Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server end of […]

Managing infrastructure deployments and application code releases can be challenging. Manual processes often lead to delays, errors, and inconsistency across different environments. This inconsistency, known as environment drift, makes it difficult to ensure reliable deployments. As a result, teams struggle to maintain a high release velocity. In this blog post, we will show how GitHub […]

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 […]

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 […]

In this blog post, I will explain how to utilize Group Policy Objects (GPOs) to configure Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to use the Amazon Time Sync Service for time synchronization. Additionally, I will explain how to monitor and alert on the time synchronization health of the domain with Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Simple Notification Service. […]

In this blog post, we will review advantages and disadvantages of the two storage access protocols, iSCSI and SMB, offered by Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSx for ONTAP). For comparison purposes, we will use Microsoft SQL Server on Windows. We will provide recommendations for selecting the optimal storage access protocol for your specific scenario. […]

Introducing the Cloud Intelligence Dashboard for Azure. Enhance cloud cost monitoring with Amazon QuickSight by integrating Microsoft Azure usage data.

Our customers tell us they want a reliable way to copy data from Azure Blob Storage to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Sometimes data needs to be moved just once, like during a migration. While other times, it needs to be copied continuously, like in a data pipeline. What’s common amongst these requests is […]

In this blog post, we will walk you through the steps required to deploy a SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster (FCI) using AWS Launch Wizard, with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP providing you with a shared storage solution. Introduction In our previous blog post, we described how to set up SQL Server FCI with […]

In this blog post, I will show how you can leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) for disaster recovery (DR) for your self-managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD). I will also provide an automated solution to help you run on-demand, periodic DR tests of your AD infrastructure as part of your larger business continuity strategy. Introduction Most […]