Microsoft Workloads on AWS
Tag: AWS Systems Manager
Accelerate Remote Desktop Gateway deployments with AWS Launch Wizard
Introduction In this blog post, I am going to show you how easy it is to deploy a secure infrastructure to manage your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for Microsoft Windows Server through the automation provided by AWS Launch Wizard. AWS Launch Wizard offers a guided way of sizing, configuring, and deploying AWS […]
Simplifying Active Directory domain join with AWS Systems Manager
In this blog post, I will demonstrate a solution for managing the Active Directory domain membership for a dynamic fleet of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Windows instances using AWS Systems Manager Automation. Using Systems Manager Automation, you can dynamically automate domain join and unjoin activities with Microsoft Active Directory (AD) for your Amazon […]
Use AWS Systems Manager to enable CloudWatch memory metrics for Windows Server Amazon EC2 instances
In this blog post, we will show how to reduce the administrative burden of enabling Amazon CloudWatch memory metric monitoring on Windows Server EC2 instances using AWS Systems Manager automation. Once enabled, we will show how memory monitoring benefits downstream services like AWS Compute Optimizer to provide accurate cost savings recommendations. Monitoring is an important […]
Update AWS Tools for PowerShell at scale with AWS Systems Manager
In this blog post, I will show you how to update AWS Tools for PowerShell at scale within your environment by using the AWS Systems Manager Run Command. Manually updating AWS Tools for PowerShell across multiple instances can be time-consuming, inefficient, and error prone. These manual operational efforts typically result in a logistical nightmare, especially […]
Automate rotating IAM credentials for SQL Server backups to Amazon S3
In this blog post, we will look at how to automate the rotation of the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) credentials synchronized with Microsoft SQL Server credentials to meet password rotation requirements. Solution overview The IAM Access key and Secret access key are used to create a SQL Server credential; therefore, to rotate the […]
Using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to Manage Azure Pipelines Agent Capacity
In this blog post, we will show you how to use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling with your self-hosted Amazon EC2 Azure Pipelines agents to deploy applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS) using Azure DevOps. Introduction There are many ways that you can build and deploy your applications to AWS. You can […]
Rotate Active Directory credentials stored in AWS Secrets Manager
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 […]
How to create an Amazon EC2 AMI usage and billing information report
Have you been tasked with identifying which Amazon Machine Images (AMI) are in use in your organization and how they are being billed? Have you researched several solutions but find that you can’t get the exact data you need or that you don’t have access to the payer-level billing data? Then this solution is for […]
Automate Active Directory domain join activities at scale with AWS Systems Manager
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 […]
Simplifying Active Directory domain join with AWS Systems Manager
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 […]