AWS re:Invent 2017

Learn how media and entertainment companies use Amazon EC2 for Windows Server for fast rendering on film and television projects. In this session, we discuss how to architect a Windows solution using Deadline to allow the freedom to easily access any combination of on-premises or cloud-based compute resources. Also, learn how to set up a hybrid Windows file system and storage for best performance and cost efficiency. With flexible third-party licensing options, customers using AWS resources can purchase software licenses from the Thinkbox marketplace, deploy existing licenses, or leverage a combination of the two.

Learn how to architect fully available and scalable Microsoft solutions and environments in AWS. Find out how Microsoft solutions can leverage various AWS services to achieve more resiliency, replace unnecessary complexity, simplify architecture, provide scalability, and introduce DevOps concepts, such as compliance, governance, automation, and repeatability. Also, plan authentication and authorization, and explore various hybrid scenarios with other cloud environment and on-premise solutions/infrastructure. Learn about common architecture patterns for network design, Active Directory, and business productivity solutions like Dynamics AX, CRM, and SharePoint, also common scenarios for custom .NET, .NET Core with SQL deployments and migrations.

Migrating databases to the cloud is a critical part of organizations cloud journey and requires careful planning and architecture considerations including migration methods.  This session will provide you with best practices and guidelines in migrating and/or architecting hybrid database architecture on AWS with focus on Microsoft SQL server databases.  We will review current SQL on RDS, SQL on EC2 capabilities, compare and contrast various migration methods including SQL Export, Backup and Restore, and using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). We will also look at how Expedia is migrating monolith SQL server databases to AWS using a hybrid approach leveraging SQL Server Distributed Availability Architecture. Expedia will share lessons learned during initial test and deployment phase followed by a demo of their existing architecture and deployment.

Enterprise organizations often require a global Active Directory footprint to support their Windows based workloads. This session will describe best practices for deploying Active Directory on AWS. Starting with a single VPC we will expand to many VPC's in many Regions, thus demonstrating AWS capabilities to support a global Active Directory environment.

Moving your entire CI/CD pipeline to AWS can be a daunting task. You have put years into building out your current system and perfecting it. How do you know the new world will be better, easier, and more scalable? The good news is you don't have to go “all in”. When developing software, we have learned that small, incremental steps are usually the safest and fastest way to go. Why would modifying your CI/CD pipeline be any different? In this session, we move a .NET application from a VSTS environment into AWS incrementally, allowing you to go as deep as you want.

More and more, companies recognize the untold riches they can save by moving their existing software licenses to AWS. This session covers how to bring your Microsoft licenses to AWS, and then demonstrates using PowerShell to import your Windows Server image from VMware or Hyper-V, configure Windows KMS with your license key, and launch an EC2 Dedicated Host. We discuss ways you can use Amazon EC2 Systems Manager to manage license compliance.

VMware Cloud on AWS lets you migrate your existing on-premises applications to the AWS Cloud while retaining the tooling, management, and operating process you already have.  VMware Cloud on AWS brings VMware's Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) to the AWS Cloud, allowing customers to run applications across operationally consistent VMware vSphere®-based private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, with optimized access to AWS services. You can use the VMware on AWS solution to bring the scalability and agility of the cloud to your existing Microsoft applications.   This session will provide an architectural deep dive on VMware on AWS for your Microsoft applications.  We will discuss the key architectural components of the VMware Cloud on AWS solution for your Microsoft applications.  Attendees will learn about best practices and receive practical advice on how to start using Vmware Cloud on AWS for their Microsoft applications.

This session dives deep on best practices and considerations for running Microsoft SQL Server on AWS. We cover best practices for deploying SQL Server, how to choose between Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, and ways to optimize the performance of your SQL Server deployment for different types of applications. 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. In addition, we discuss 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.

Over the past decade, Verizon built significant investments in on-premises technology. Migrating legacy applications and IT systems takes time, so architecting a secure and performant hybrid architecture is essential to Verizon's cloud adoption. In this session, you see how Verizon operationalized their existing on-premises IT infrastructure with AWS while providing the flexibility needed for both modern and legacy applications. Verizon solved extremely challenging enterprise constraints. Learn from Verizon's cloud experience, and see the resulting architectures designed to meet strict security and compliance requirements while delivering faster application and system migration.

The new AWS Tools for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) provide integration into many popular AWS services, such as Amazon S3, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Lambda, and more. These tools provide customers with a set of tasks they can include in build and release definitions in VSTS and on-premises TFS instances to work with AWS services. In this session, we show how you can use the new AWS Tools for VSTS in new and existing VSTS build/release pipelines to interoperate with many AWS resources. We demonstrate how you can use the build tasks in the new extensions to easily work with content in Amazon S3 buckets, perform deployments to AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments, and deploy .NET Core functions and serverless applications to AWS Lambda, all from within the familiar VSTS project console.