What is Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon EC2?

Flexible licensing options — When you use Amazon EC2 instances with the license included, you are using instances with fully-compliant Windows Server and SQL Server that are licensed through AWS. Flexible BYOL options include default tenant EC2 for products that are eligible for Microsoft License Mobility through Software Assurance, as well as Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts and Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances. You can use AWS License Manager to track the usage of software licenses and reduce the risk of non-compliance. For more information, see Licensing in the Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Frequently Asked Questions.

High performance block storage — Amazon Elastic Block Store provides multiple options for high-performance block storage for Microsoft SQL Server. EC2 Instances using io2 Block Express give you the highest block storage performance with a single storage volume. Other SSD-backed Amazon EBS options include io2 volumes for business-critical applications and gp3 volumes for general purpose applications. Amazon EBS also offers crash-consistent snapshots, and enables application-consistent snapshots through Windows VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Services) to help protect your SQL Server deployments.

Fully-managed shared storage — Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP offer fully-managed shared storage for high-availability SQL Server failover cluster instances (FCI) workloads.

Windows-based services — AWS Directory Service offers managed Microsoft Active Directory with identity and access management.

Scalable processors — Intel Xeon Scalable Processors on AWS provide you with better data protection, faster processing of more data volumes, and increased service flexibility for Amazon EC2.

Migration programs — AWS offers programs for migration for customers looking to migrate SQL Server workloads to AWS. AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for Windows provides services, best practices, and tools to help you save costs and accelerate your migration on AWS.

Windows workload optimization — After you move your SQL Server workloads to AWS, you can continue to optimize costs, usage, and licenses to suit your business requirements. With Cost Explorer Service, you can visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. AWS Compute Optimizer recommends optimal AWS compute resources for your workloads so that you can reduce costs up to 25% by analyzing historical utilization data. AWS Trusted Advisor can check that your EC2 instances have the required amount of SQL Server licenses and that the EC2 instance vCPU count doesn’t exceed what is permitted for the SQL Server edition. AWS Managed Services can help operate your cloud environment post-migration by analyzing alerts and responding to incidents, reducing operational overhead and risk. You can use AWS Systems Manager to automate operational tasks across your AWS resources and better manage your infrastructure at scale.

AWS can help you to modernize you Windows-based applications with AWS open source services if you want to reduce the high cost of commercial licensing. Options include running SQL Server database applications on Linux, moving workloads to Amazon Aurora, containerizing your Windows applications with Amazon EKS, going serverless with AWS Lambda, or taking advantage of micro-services based architecture.