On Thursday, May 12th we held a Lunch + Lab event at Amazon’s Santa Monica office on scaling Windows workloads in AWS. The agenda included a technical presentation from our CTO and AWS Solutions Architect Kevin Epstein, an interactive demonstration on how to quickly scale large volumes of Windows workloads in AWS using PowerShell and EC2 Run Command, and a discussion on AWS best practices and making the business case for AWS managed services in your organization. After the presentation, attendees enjoyed lunch and asking our AWS Reps and technical experts questions about their AWS environments. The event drew a mix of CEOs, CTOs, Developers, Engineers, and many AWS enthusiasts.
Key takeaways from our conversations with event attendees were that automation is on their minds. Organizations are consistently being asked to do more with less, faster. In the case of Windows, there have been many challenges around some legacy security models’ dependency on Active Directory, reboot pains, typically heavy software packages, and only being able to bootstrap to a point. The DevOps process is helping solve some of these challenges as we start thinking of our infrastructure as code and follow a well-defined pattern of build, test, and deploy – with automated testing as the goal. AWS makes the DevOps process easy. Tools like AWS OpsWorks, EC2 Simple Systems Manager, Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation, CodePipeline, and CodeDeploy are helping IT to innovate faster, increase the number of deployments, decrease the time between deployments, and automate to consistently deliver stable predictable and secure environments.
Here are some of the Scaling Windows Workloads in AWS presentation highlights:
Whether you’re running Microsoft Windows, SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, or custom .NET applications, you can rely on the secure global infrastructure of Amazon Web Services to easily run any Microsoft Windows Server applications in the cloud. With tools like Windows PowerShell and Amazon EC2 Run Command, IT can quickly scale their current environment and enjoy all of the benefits AWS has to offer for management, administration, workload reliability, visibility, and cross-platform support.
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