AWS is committed to making our platform the best place to run Windows workloads by helping you save costs, scale and innovate to unlock the maximum value from Windows for your organization and your end-users. Customers love our dedication to provide choice and flexibility, that allows them to define a cloud strategy that makes the most sense for their business. Read these stories on how customers are migrating to AWS to enjoy unparalleled performance and reliability.
To read more about customers that are modernizing on AWS, please visit our new modernization blog channel.
SQL Server on AWS
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Event Hospitality & Entertainment Limited (EVENT) is Australia’s premier entertainment, hospitality and leisure company. It has proud and historic origins dating back to 1910 and currently operates within the Entertainment and Hospitality sectors in Australia, New Zealand and Germany.
“We can scale in a heartbeat on AWS and have a level of elasticity we never had before, which is especially valuable in times of uncertainty.”
Peter Bourke, Director of IT, Event Hospitality & Management
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GetPlus is an Indonesia-based startup that helps brands boost retention and profitability through its customer loyalty rewards program.
“With AWS and ICS Compute, we can drive development while maximizing the value of our program for partners and increasing the profitability of their customer relationships.”
Adrian Hoon, Cofounder and Chief Operating Officer, GetPlus
N KID Group is Vietnam's leading player in the kids' lifestyle market. For more than 10 years, N KID Group has been operating indoor playgrounds under its flagship brand, tiNiWorld, to give children a space to safely run, play, and explore.
“Developers now have peace of mind, and we are all more relaxed because we can deploy automatically using AWS Elastic Beanstalk with no constraints.”
Do Bui Anh Khoa, Chief Technology Officer, N KID Group
Hess Corporation is a leading global independent energy company engaged in the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas.
“The work we did demonstrated to the organization what was possible working with AWS. The impetus for this particular effort was provided by the divestiture — but now that we’ve gone through the process, we know what is possible with AWS Cloud. In the future, we will look to build cloud solutions as alternatives to our on-premises capabilities.”
Jim McDonald, Lead Architect, Hess Corporation
Kaplan, Inc. serves more than 1.2 million students globally each year through its array of higher education, test preparation, professional education, English-language training, university preparation, and K-12 offerings to individuals, institutions, and businesses.
“Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) allows our DBA team to focus less on the day-to-day maintenance and use their time to work on enhancements. And Elastic Load Balancing has allowed us to move away from expensive and complicated load balancers and retain the required functionality. Using multiple regions allows us to put our data closer to the customer for a better end-user experience”
Chad Marino, Executive Director of Technology Services, Kaplan
Delaware North is a major food and hospitality company serving half a billion customers each year.
“We compared the costs of keeping our on-premises data center versus moving to the AWS cloud…We estimate that moving to AWS will save us at least $3.5 million over five years by reducing our server hardware by more than 90%. But the cost savings will likely be greater due to additional benefits, like the increased compute capacity we can get using AWS. That lets us continually add more and larger workloads than we could using a traditional data center infrastructure, and achieve savings by only paying for what we use.”
Kevin Quinlivan, Chief Techology Officer, Delaware North
The global authority on world records, Guinness World Records (GWR), was originally a traditional book publisher. To better serve their audience over the past decade, the GWR website and online presence have become focal points of their brand in the record-breaking community. Guinness World Records has had to reimagine their IT architecture, moving all-in on Amazon Web Services (AWS) over a period of 10 months.
“We can eliminate huge wait times for project, deliver more content to our key gross markets in China and Latin America. It's such a key move for us, and will set the business up for many years to come."
Rob Howe, Director of IT, Guinness World Records
Jobvite is a provides leading software-as-a-service recruiting solutions that helps companies source, hire, and onboard top talent.
“Now we’re well above 99.98% availability for our services. The difference is night and day. We were in a situation where my team was working around the clock to maintain a high level of service. After we migrated to AWS, my system and database administrators now regularly get a full night of sleep. We also raised an additional $25 million of expansion capital from investors.”
Theodore Kim, Senior Director of SaaS Operations, Jobvite
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is the trade association for the world’s airlines, representing 250 airlines, which account for 84 percent of the world’s air traffic.
“The AWS Cloud is changing the paradigm—it’s letting us be considerably more strategic in how we spend our resources, not to mention providing more functionality to users. We need AWS so that we can turn around the data quickly for our customers. Our response times have definitely improved, thanks to Amazon EC2.”
Pascal Buchner, Director of IT Services & CIO, IATA
GE Avio Aero is a GE Aviation business which operates in the design, manufacture and maintenance of civil and military aeronautics components and systems. The company had to upgrade its SharePoint site, which hosted several critical applications. Avio Aero required a highly available environment, and lower costs.With Amazon FSx, GE Avio Aero deployed a highly available SQL Server Failover Cluster with SQL Standard licenses. Amazon FSx provided significant savings and a lower TCO compared to using SQL Enterprise licenses for Always On groups on premises.
"Using Amazon FSx for Windows File Server allowed us to run an highly available SharePoint site, while at the same time reduce our SQL license costs by more than 60%. The feedback from our users is very positive, both in terms of performance and reliability of the system."
Ivani Di Conca, Senior Manager, Digital Operations, Avio Aero
AdvancedMD offers cloud software for independent medical practices that delivers industry-leading patient outcomes & financial performance. AdvancedMD needed to scale its existing hosting infrastructure for medical data to keep up with the demands for new products and rapid customer growth in doctors’ offices. Their current storage platform was causing performance issues with their SQL Server database backups due to the length of time to complete a backup. Using Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, AdvancedMD migrated its clients’ data to the AWS Cloud to provide secure, readily accessible hosting and increased performance through improved Microsoft SQL Server database processing time.
"Without Amazon FSx, we would have spent hours every day on a backup as opposed to actually helping our business grow."
Steve Coombs, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, AdvancedMD
TechnologyOne is one of the largest software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in Australia and delivers solutions to a range of global customers. They run a SaaS platform that relies on thousands of SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) with the SQL Server instances on Amazon EC2 and storage on Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. They were able to complete thousands of database migrations to Amazon FSx in just a few weeks.
"Using Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, we can securely deliver cost-effective file storage to thousands of customers at scale."
Craig Taylor, Director of software-as-a-service product and platform, TechnologyOne
Windows Server on AWS
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Global Power Synergy Public Company Ltd. (GPSC) Group is a flagship provider of sustainable energy in Thailand.
“Migration to AWS has allowed us to pursue innovation with access to services that go beyond the footprint of on-premises infrastructure.”
Pongthep Muangkaew, Digital Platforms Division Manager, GPSC Group
888 Holdings PLC Company is one of the world's most popular online gaming operators & platform providers.
“After buying a new company, we needed a fast way to migrate one of their existing datacenters. With AWS, we were able to quickly migrate Windows Servers, SQL Server, .NET application workloads in 3 weeks. After migrating these workloads, we were able to achieve faster time to market, ensure security for the datacenter and save thousands of dollars per month.”
Gabi Dvir, IT Director, Head Of Infrastructure, 888.com
Ancestry analyzes and compares billions of historical records, tens of millions of family trees, and millions of existing customer DNA profiles to deliver data-driven insights that help empower journeys of personal discovery.
“AWS provides us with the flexibility we need to stay at the forefront of consumer genomics. We’re confident that AWS provides us with unmatched scalability, security, and privacy.”
Nat Naterajan, VP Product & Technology, Ancestry
Emirates was in the process of migrating their business-critical booking engine from on premises to the AWS Cloud and needed reliable shared storage for their content management system (CMS). Amazon FSx for Windows File Server enabled Emirates to easily provision file storage for their CMS to store shared files for their booking website.
"With Amazon FSx, it was easy to migrate our flagship sites from our hosted data center to AWS. Our CMS needed high performance, stronger security, and reliable shared storage -- with the added bonus of scalability. Amazon FSx removed the complexity of managing our file-based workloads, significantly contributed to an uplift in performance and reliability, and most importantly, reduced the operational efforts across all of our teams.”
Anoop Kumar C, Principal Engineer, Emirates Group
Infor builds business applications with last-mile functionality and scientific insights, delivered securely through the cloud for select industries.
“After moving about 11 TB of data in 3 Regions, we were able to decommission 5 storage arrays and save over 6 hours a month of management time. All in all, we reduced our storage costs by about 50%. With less time and money spent on data storage, we can focus on our core business – delivering mission-critical enterprise applications for our customers – without having to worry about pre-provisioning storage as we scale."
Greg Bell, Cloud Services Manager, Infor
Macmillan Learning is an educational solutions company focused on delivering content, tools and services to facilitate instruction and learning.
“Using AWS, we have on-demand capacity for Launchpad. We can easily scale the application to support the exponential user growth we are witnessing each academic year. We can now provision new instances in minutes, as opposed to the hours it used to take.”
Dawit Lessanu, Vice President of Architecture and Engineering, Macmillan Learning
Origin Energy is a leading energy provider in Australia that supplies energy options, including electricity and gas, across the country.
“Origin Energy is moving to Cloud to provide increased flexibility and agility to better serve our customers. In doing this we are faced with tactical applications running on older, legacy Windows server operating systems. Due to the tactical nature and limited lifespan of these applications, investment to re-platform or refactor the application is not preferred. To address this Origin Energy is in the initial phases of evaluating the AWS End-of-life Migration Program (EMP) to enable the supported and secure migration of legacy Windows applications without the requirement for code changes.”
Nick Andrews, Group Manager - Cloud and Infrastructure Services, Origin IT
The Redcat Hospitality IT Platform provides a point-of-sale solution, including kitchen management and reporting, for cafés, restaurants, and multisite franchises. Redcat also enables loyalty campaigns, online ordering, and business intelligence.
“If you’re running Windows with other workloads or are thinking about future integrations with advanced analytics or machine learning, you’d be crazy not to consider AWS."
Phillip Frantz, Special Projects, Redcat
Unliever is a consumer goods company that sells food, home care, refreshments, and personal care products in over 190 countries.
“By using AWS, we improved time to launch for a digital marketing campaign from two weeks to an average of two days. That’s more than seven times faster than our traditional environment. If a brand manager has an idea, he or she can implement it before the competition.”
Sreenivas Yalamanchili, Digital Marketing Services (DMS) Global Technical Manager, Unilever
Modernizing Windows Server and SQL Server on AWS
As customers bring their Windows workloads to AWS, many will look to modernize over time to reduce costs, gain agility and break free from licensing restrictions. Here are a few stories of customers which modernized their SQL Server databases on AWS.
Asure helps businesses develop Human Capital to get to the next level, stay compliant, and allocate their time, money and technology toward growth.
“Our mission is to deliver HCM software and services that help our customers grow, and our partnership with AWS through the Application Modernization Lab aligns perfectly with this goal.”
Pat Goepel, Chairman & CEO for Asure
"By partnering with AWS, we are able to accelerate our modernization journey by updating legacy platforms and rearchitecting our systems. This not only optimizes our cloud environment but also empowers us to respond exponentially faster to HCM market demands and changes.”
Yasmine Rodriguez, CTO for Asure
Verisk provides expert data-driven analytic insights that help business, people, and societies become stronger, more resilient, and sustainable.
“The AWS Application Modernization Lab (AML) was a modernization accelerator for the Verisk Analytics LNAV team as it helped us shape our future design patterns to cloud native. As a result, we helped influence the growth of AWS serverless and Lambda across our team in Verisk Casualty Solutions group due to the key learnings from AML. In addition, the lab trainings were valuable and showed the importance of AML certifications to the extent we added this to each employee’s annual goals–one AWS certification per employee per year. I highly recommend the AML for both advancing modernization strategies and upskilling of our valued employees.”
Linto Mathew, Sr. Technology Leader, Verisk Analytics
Neon was founded in 2016 with a mission to unite technology and design to redesign and simplify people's financial experience, as well as help them better manage their own money.
“AWS and the Application Modernization Lab team have helped us identify and build a solid strategy to deprecate our legacy workload, helping us estimate a roadmap that would drastically reduce TCO. Our partnership with AWS supports our mission of uniting technology and design to redesign and simplify people’s financial experiences.”
Vinicius Filenga, Staff Software Engineer, Neon
The Sharing and Enablement of Environmental Data (SEED) portal is a comprehensive resource for landowners in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, who are curious about koala sightings or fire history in their area.
“We want to grow the number of datasets and are focused on improving the user experience rather than the operational side of things. We’re thinking more about the business and the platform, and that’s where we want to be.”
Sten Christensen, Senior Team Leader, SEED
Biblica, or the International Bible Society, was founded in 1809 and is the worldwide copyright holder of the New International Version of the Bible.
"Biblica, the International Bible Society, was experiencing website performance issues due to high traffic levels. MissionCloud moved Biblica onto more scalable infrastructure, specifically around auto-scaling and shared storage using EFS for their workload. “Biblica appropriately sized their database to handle very high traffic levels by migrating their on-premises Microsoft SQL Server database to Amazon Aurora MySQL on Linux.”
Mark Medina, VP Marketing, MissionCloud
Catalis is a leading provider of software solutions to government agencies across North America in the areas of tax assessment, payment processing, courts/land record management, and citizen engagement.
"We run Windows and SQL Server-based workloads on AWS. The AWS team has been helpful and has provided architectural guidance on how we can modernize to save costs, innovate, and respond to change faster. Refactoring to a modern architecture and adopting managed containers and serverless services helps us better utilize infrastructure resources and reduce cost.”
Pat Harper, Chief Technology Officer, Catalis
Based in the Netherlands, Davinci provides software solutions for the loan and mortgage industries.
“For us Aurora-Postgres on Linux means database freedom, rich set of features, flexibility and scalability. We think it’s made for financial services and it helps us to stay ahead of competitors.”
Jan Lamber Voortman, Managing Director, Davinci
Decisiv provides a cloud-based service relationship management (SRM) software-as-a-service solution for commercial fleets to effectively manage and measure service and repair events to drive uptime and asset availability.
"Aurora PostgreSQL on Linux is instrumental for Decisiv as we upgrade our infrastructure to support the growing scale, performance and reliability requirements that our customers expect. We've consolidated multiple SQL Server instances into a single database that boasts higher performance at a better cost. Thanks to Aurora, our migration from SQL Server to PostgreSQL on Linux went more smoothly than we anticipated, and we are now well-positioned to rapidly scale."
Satish Joshi, CTO, Decisiv
DraftKings Inc. is a digital sports entertainment and gaming company created to fuel the competitive spirits of sports fans with products that range across daily fantasy, regulated gaming, and digital media. DraftKings Inc. is a digital sports entertainment and gaming company created to fuel the competitive spirits of sports fans with products that range across daily fantasy, regulated gaming, and digital media.
"A little over a year ago, we laid out a path to lower costs, increase scalability, application flexibility and improve developer efficiency. We identified an opportunity to get started on this path by modernizing our legacy .NET applications, with step one being a conversion to .NET Core."
David Musicant, Director of Architecture, Draft Kings
Earth Networks manages and operates sensor networks that collect real-time weather and lightning data. The company’s enterprise solutions enables organizations and markets to prepare for weather and climate events and improve business operations.
“Earth Networks utilizes AWS Aurora as the high-availability database backend for our critical Entity Management system. This system provides partner and account subscription management, authorization, access, and customization details for all our SaaS and DaaS products and services. Customers can easily update their access and settings, add additional subscriptions or products, refine customizations for their users’ profiles, and manage licenses. With AWS’s Aurora services, our infrastructure provides best-in-class security, structure, and availability to support our customers’ access and customization needs so they can leverage our critical weather data to make smart business and safety decisions.”
Randy Lakin, Director of IT, Earth Networks
Expedia Group provides travel-booking services across its flagship site Expedia.com and about 200 other travel-booking sites around the world. The company modernized its SQL Server and .NET workloads on AWS to gain cost savings and agility, speeding its vendor payment transactions from one day to seconds.
"On Aurora PostgreSQL, we pay only for what we use, and it automatically adjusts as our data grows.” On Aurora PostgreSQL, we pay only for what we use, and it automatically adjusts as our data grows.”
Nirupama Jagarlamudi, Senior Director, Software Development, Expedia Group
FireEye creates cybersecurity solutions that are used by global organizations and governments.
“Modernizing onto AWS Aurora and Amazon Serverless services allowed FireEye to release a product in marketplace in months, versus years. We will be able to innovate and scale to meet the elastic requirements of our customers and grow to meet their needs.”
Sai Vashisht, Distinguished Engineer, FireEye
Mathnasium™ is North America’s leading, math-only supplemental education company, with more than 1,000 locations worldwide.
"Having automated backups, database snapshots, multiple availability zones and the ease of being able to change class sizes has made Mathnasium far more efficient than they were with on-premises SQL Server. Now, instead of having to dedicate different IT professionals to separate tasks, Mathnasium can easily manage everything from a single console, freeing up the department to focus on other development concerns.“
Jason Condello, VP of Technology, Mathnasium
Pearson provides content, assessment, and digital services to learners, educational institutions, employers, governments, and other partners globally. It helps equip learners with the skills they need to enhance employability prospects and succeed.
“We saw a significant cost benefit after migrating Schoolnet to AWS, but we also learned a lot. That was one of the first big Windows systems that we migrated to AWS, and we were able to take advantage of a lot of diverse services from AWS. With the capabilities we’ve gained by migrating to the cloud, our integration with other products and services has been amazing.”
Ian Wright, Vice President of Infrastructure and Operations, Pearson
SeatGeek is a mobile-focused ticketing marketplace that connects people buying and selling tickets to live events. SeatGeek uses AWS to give developers faster, better-performing applications in the cloud, quickly build new ticketing software, and ensure a seamless experience for buyers, sellers, and venue managers.
“By running our .NET application on AWS, we get high availability, which is critical to ensure a seamless experience for ticket sellers, buyers, and sports and concert venue managers.”
Jon Coe, Senior Software Engineer, SeatGeek
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Trimble offers software, hardware and services to help customers in agriculture, construction, geospatial, and other industries to blend physical and digital businesses.
"Migrating our Windows-based application to AWS has resulted in close to 100% uptime on a system that is significantly easier to scale. As soon as we did the migration and we completed the reservations on these instances, we were able to save about 23% cost based on what we were spending on drag space. And after enabling scheduled scaling methodologies where the development instances don't run all the time and the production instances run only UK working hours, Trimble is easily able to see about 35% savings.”
Balaji Srinivasan, Director Cloud Operations, Viewpoint (Trimble)
Visma offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) human resources and financial management applications to about one million customers across Europe. The company uses AWS to release new software features as quickly as possible to meet users’ needs.
“By migrating one of our .NET applications to AWS and modernizing, we were able to go from releasing 6 software features per year to releasing 6 features per month. That means we can respond quickly to new market opportunities and get new features to customers before our competitors.”
Alexander Lystad, Chief Cloud Architect, Visma
Xero provides cloud-based accounting software to small and medium-sized businesses, with over two million subscribers worldwide.
“Running Windows on AWS was a key enabler in our move to AWS in 2015. CloudFormation allowed us to reimagine our existing manual deployment processes entirely in code. More recently AWS System Manager made it even easier to run script for patching in a controlled manner across portions of our Windows fleet. Finally, the stability of the EC2 platform when combined with Autoscaling groups gives us peace of mind around tolerating Availability Zone failure without missing a beat. This allows our teams to focus on improving the application or in some cases transitioning part of the stack to containers. Over the next 3 years, Xero plans to move from a 70% Windows / 30% Linux mix to a 30% Windows / 70% Linux mix of OS. The flexibility of the AWS Platform has been a key enabler in this change.”
Ben Salt, Executive GM of Reliability, Xero
Migrating from Microsoft Azure to AWS
BrightLine is an advertising company that delivers interactive television solutions for brands. In 2021, the company migrated from a solution built on Microsoft Azure using a .NET application to AWS in 6 months.
"We’ve been able to scale our team and move faster to grow our business and create our products because of the cost savings from using AWS.”
Jason McGowan, Vice President of Engineering, BrightLine
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Arista Group is one of Indonesia’s largest automotive dealers, with a network of locations across the archipelago, offering over a hundred brands of cars and motorcycles.
“With AWS, we can focus on adding more business units and innovate faster at a lower cost.”
Fabiano Wiradiputera, IT Manager, Arista Group
eMarketer is a research company that enables thousands of companies around the world to better understand markets and consumer behavior.
“A year ago we moved the majority of our workloads including .NET-based microservices, Kubernetes Clusters, Microsoft SQL Server, and more from Azure into AWS. Our experiences with AWS’s sales team, Technical Support and Solutions Architects are a world of difference. With the improved performance and reliability of our microservices, and approximately 18% cost savings, we haven’t looked back.”
David Sheehan, Lead DevOps Engineer / Systems Architect, eMarketer
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IntelliGuard creates Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) solutions that offer automation for management of pharmaceutical inventory and critical care supplies.
"When I first came to IntelliGuard, I saw what we had built in Azure and, knowing what I knew about AWS, felt it was only right to advocate that we move to AWS. I feel AWS is much more mature than Azure. It was the obvious choice. We must make it easy for our developers to deploy into an infrastructure, create solutions, and iterate. When we ran in Azure, I didn't see those capabilities for our team. For example, the Azure SQL database solution didn't have much of the functionality we wanted to take advantage of, even though SQL is a Microsoft product. Comparatively, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server provided us all of the flexibility and functionality we needed and more."
Jeff Webber, Director of Technology, IntelliGuard
Seven West Media is an Australian magazine publisher. The company publishes New Idea, InStyle, Marie Claire, Women’s Health, and other popular Australian lifestyle brands
"That [DDoS] attack was more than double the spike that had triggered the most recent downtime event on our previous cloud infrastructure, but on AWS it was barely a blip. With zero downtime and no effect on user experience, we avoided revenue losses and damage to our reputation with readers and advertisers."
Will Everitt, Director of Digital Product and Technology, Seven West Media
RepricerExpress, a sister application of automated feedback solution FeedbackExpress, enables Amazon Marketplace and eBay sellers to set and customize automated pricing strategies.
“It’s an easy migration to AWS from Azure. AWS services are up to the task, and it’s easier to manage your Microsoft licensing on AWS. When considering your long-term objectives, you should definitely look at AWS."
Damian Elder, DevOps Engineer, RepricerExpress
AgriDigital, based in Australia, offers solutions to help global agriculture supply chains reduce risk, with a focus on grain and cotton.
"Our application is running at least 50% faster on AWS, which is leading to a better experience for the farmers and other supply chain customers using the application."
Dominik Moreitz, Head of Engineering and DevOps Lead, AgriDigital