The following whitepapers have been authored by the AWS team, independent analysts, or the AWS community (customers and partners). They all cover implementation of Microsoft software based solutions on AWS and many also include step-by-step reference implementation guides, sample code, and AWS CloudFormation templates to help automate deployment.
Some of the guides are AWS Quick Starts, which are designed to help you rapidly deploy fully functional software on the AWS cloud, following AWS best practices. Quick Starts are modular and customizable, allowing you to modify them for your own implementations. The Microsoft based guides are provided here, while the full set of Quick Starts covers other topics such as Docker, Chef, MongoDB, Magento, SAP HANA and more.
More whitepapers are available at the main AWS whitepapers page. To read reports authored by industry analysts go here.
July 2016
The goal of this whitepaper is to help you understand how to deploy SQL Server databases on AWS. You can run SQL Server databases on Amazon RDS as a fully managed service or on Amazon EC2 that you manage with full control over the environment. We review in detail how to provision and monitor your SQL Server databases, and how to manage scalability, performance, availability, security, and backup and recovery, in both Amazon RDS and Amazon EC2. This paper also describes how you can set up a Disaster Recovery solution between an on-premises SQL Server environment and AWS, using native SQL Server features like log shipping, replication, and AlwaysOn Availability Groups.
May 2016
This Quick Start deploys four popular Microsoft products in an optimized environment on AWS: SQL Server, Exchange Server, Lync Server, and SharePoint Server. The deployment also includes Active Directory Domain Services as the foundation for these business productivity applications. The Quick Start provides an AWS CloudFormation template that automates the deployment, and also features a guide that discusses the architecture and implementation, provides step-by-step instructions, and explains customization options for this mission-critical enterprise platform.
May 2016
Deploys Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016 in a highly available architecture on the AWS cloud. The implementation includes a Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) infrastructure, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 or 2014 instances configured in a Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC), and multiple Amazon EC2 instances to participate in the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016 farm. The Quick Start supports both traditional and streamlined topologies.
April 2016
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Dedicated Hosts can help enterprises reduce costs by allowing the use of existing server-bound licenses. Many customers can also use Dedicated Hosts to address corporate compliance and regulatory requirements. Oftentimes, customers using Dedicated Hosts want to continuously record and evaluate changes to their infrastructure to stay compliant with license terms and regulatory requirements.This paper outlines the ways in which you can leverage AWS Config and AWS Config Rules to monitor license compliance on Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts.
March 2016
This paper describes the benefits of modernizing your applications on Amazon Web Services and how you can get started on the journey. It shows how you can benefit from running corporate applications, LOB and database applications, or developing new applications using the AWS platform for your modernization initiative. We recommend the AWS services that you should look to start the process of modernizing your applications on AWS.
December 2015
EC2 Simple Systems Manager (SSM) is a feature that facilitates the automatic configuration of EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows. SSM currently supports these scenarios: joining instances to a Microsoft Active Directory domain, installing MSI Packages or PowerShell Modules, and delivering log file data to Amazon CloudWatch.
October 2015
This paper describes potential use cases and security technologies for running Windows Storage Spaces in AWS over the Server Message Block (SMB) and Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) protocols. To embrace the DevOps philosophy of “infrastructure as code,” Windows PowerShell scripts are provided to quickly deploy Storage Spaces in AWS. The paper is intended for Microsoft Windows IT professionals and developers who are interested in combining Windows Server 2012 R2 Storage Spaces with the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) service.
August 2015
Deploys Web Application Proxy and Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) on the AWS cloud. These two components of Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 provide identity federation, single sign-on (SSO), reverse proxy, and pre-authentication services for publishing your web applications in AWS.
The Quick Start includes a deployment guide that describes the architecture for implementing Web Application Proxy and AD FS on AWS, and AWS CloudFormation templates that automate the deployment.
July 2015
Businesses of all sizes maintain file server infrastructure for storage and sharing of corporate documents. Although many businesses have recovery plans in place, they are often rarely tested or rely on traditional backup solutions that may not always meet the recovery time objectives (RTO) or recovery point objectives (RPO), particularly for large file servers.
This paper describes a step-by-step approach to implementing a proven and cost-effective disaster recovery solution for Windows-based file servers that can minimize data loss and provide fast, automatic recovery of file services running on the AWS cloud.
June 2015
Whether on-premises or in the cloud, managing a large Microsoft Windows Server fleet can be challenging. Microsoft Active Directory addresses many of these challenges by centralizing credentials, enforcing server configurations, and more. AWS Directory Service lets you can connect your existing Active Directory domain to the AWS cloud using AD Connector or launch a new standalone domain in AWS using a Simple AD directory.
This white paper describes how AWS Directory Service and the Simple Systems Manager (SSM) features within the Amazon EC2 API can be used to manage your Windows Server fleet in the AWS cloud.
June 2015
This Quick Start guide helps you deploy a small or medium-sized Lync Server environment on the AWS cloud. It includes a CloudFormation template that automatically deploys paired Lync Server 2013 Standard Edition pools across two Availability Zones for high availability and disaster recovery, and also provides sizing guidance for larger deployments.
April 2015
This paper describes an ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) web application written in C# that invokes C++ functions running on the GPU for matrix multiplication. Since matrix multiplication is of order N-cubed, multiplying two 1024 x 1024 matrixes requires over one billion multiplications, and is therefore an example of a compute-intensive operation that would be a good candidate for GPU programming. This paper shows how to use AWS Elastic Beanstalk and the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio to launch a Microsoft Windows Server instance with an NVIDIA GPU in Amazon EC2 on AWS. It is intended for Windows developers who are interested in writing high-performance parallel code in AWS using the Microsoft C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) library.
January 2015
This Quick Start reference deployment guide includes architectural considerations and configuration steps for deploying Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 in a highly available architecture on the AWS cloud, following AWS best practices. You can deploy the automated solution, provided by AWS CloudFormation templates, or customize the templates to meet your own requirements.
November 2014
Windows Server and SQL Server provide built-in capabilities to run highly available solutions. This updated Quick Start Deployment Guide covers failover clusters and the AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature added in SQL 2012, including configuration steps and testing instructions.
September 2014
PowerShell Desired State Configuration provides a configuration management platform in Windows Server, which enables you to express the desired state of your systems using declarative language syntax instead of complex imperative scripts. This Quick Start guide outlines deployment of a PowerShell DSC pull server environment using AWS resources and shows how to use AWS CloudFormation to bootstrap your servers and applications from scratch.
May 2014
Learn how to deploy Remote Desktop Gateway on AWS and get best practices for securely accessing your Windows-based instances using the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) for remote administration. We cover best practices and configuration steps to connect over HTTPS for a secure, encrypted connection.
April 2014
Learn how to deploy Active Directory on AWS in about an hour. This reference implementation guide includes architectural considerations and configuration steps for deploying highly available AD Domain Services in the AWS cloud. Two scenarios are covered, one all cloud and one hybrid.
Written with Microsoft Exchange Server IT infrastructure administrators and deployment engineers in mind, this guide discusses how to use familiar tools to plan and deploy a Microsoft Exchange Server 2010-based messaging service in the AWS cloud. It also provides a small deployment scenario to help you launch a fully configured site-resilient Exchange Server in AWS.
August 2012
This paper provides guidance on how to secure your Microsoft applications on AWS. It outlines the principles for protecting the runtime environment of your Microsoft Windows applications with a focus on risk assessment, reducing attack surface, adhering to the principle of least privilege, and protecting your data.
September 2011
This paper describes how and why Amazon's corporate IT organization deployed its corporate intranet (an enterprise mission-critical corporate IT application that involves highly sensitive data) running Microsoft SharePoint 2010 to the AWS cloud.
April 2010
This whitepaper provides step-by-step instructions for using Microsoft’s Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) technology to create a test lab demonstrating identity federation between an on-site Windows Server Active Directory domain and an ASP.NET web application hosted on EC2 service.
December 2009
This is an overview paper written by a vendor and co-sponsored by AWS and Microsoft.