Getting to Know the Features and Benefits of Amazon EC2 For Microsoft Windows Server

Expedite the implementation and migration of your Microsoft Workloads with Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows. Let us dive deeper together to learn more about benefits of migrating your Windows workloads to Amazon EC2.

Customers with Microsoft Workloads are looking for migration of their workloads to Amazon EC2 in order to take advantage of performance, agility, security, and cost savings. Nonetheless, switching your OS from running Windows applications on-premises to the cloud can seem intimidating rightfully and it requires critical migration decisions around architectural design and system & application configuration.

We, as LimonCloud, provide the assistance when it comes to architectural design, migration, and handling the management of the infrastructure on AWS (Amazon Web Services) environment to boost the agility, security, and cost optimization.

Amazon EC2 Instance Types

• General Purpose: General purpose instances are designed for customers who need equal strength for computing, memory, and networking. Customers should consider general purpose instances if their applications utilize these resources in equal amounts. These diversified workloads can range such as small databases, personal projects, virtual desktops, and development environments.
• Compute Optimized: Designed for compute-bound apps that make the most of high-performance CPUs. These instances are appropriate for machine learning, batch workloads, video encoding, High Performance Computing (HPC), and gaming servers.
• Memory Optimized: These instances are geared towards to deliver high performance for workloads that process massive data sets in memory such as in-memory databases and distributed web caches. RAM provides numerous tasks at one time. The application runs with high memory requirement and is still able to deliver high performance.
• Storage Optimized: These instances are optimized for storage intensive tasks such as high, sequential read and write access to big data sets on local storage. These instances are optimized to ensure low latency, random I/O operations to apps. Consider storage optimized instances for data warehouse applications, high-frequency OLTP systems.

Amazon EC2 Purchasing Options:

• On-Demand Instances:
• Pay as you go with no upfront payment
• Have the highest cost out of all options
• Does not require long-term commitment
• Recommended for short-term, uninterrupted and unpredictable workloads
• Standard Reserved Instances:
• Requires Long-term commitment
• Reservation Periods: 1 year or 3 years commitment
• Option to sell unused instances through AWS Marketplace
• Recommended for constant, steady-state applications like databases
• Convertible Reserved Instances:
• Offers flexibility over Standard Reserved Instances
• Different instance families, operating systems, tenancies
• Reservation Periods: 1 year or 3 years commitment
• Lower discount than Standard Reserved Instances
• No option to sell unused instances through the AWS Marketplace
• Scheduled Reserved Instances:
• Reserve instances for a scheduled time window (e.g every day from 9 AM to 5 PM)
• Spot Instances:
• Spare Amazon EC2 compute capacity
• Discount up to 90% from its on-demand price
• Bid on available EC2 instances to use them
• Option to terminate if the spot price increases
• Spot Blocks are available if the workflow needs to be uninterrupted
• Good for batch, big data, distributed, HPC and media rendering jobs
• Dedicated Hosts:
• Server hardware is dedicated to a specific company and is not shared with other companies
• Reservation period is 3 years.
• Each host is charged
• Useful for BYOL, strong regulatory and compliance
• On-demand payment and reservation up to 70% discount from the on-demand price are available
• Savings Plans:
• Flexible pricing model that reduces customer’s costs with one- or three-years commitments for hourly consumption. There are two options to choose from;
• Compute Savings Plans: Make a commitment for hourly consumption to Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate or AWS Lambda for one- or three-years terms
• EC2 Instance Savings Plans: Make a commitment for hourly consumption to the instance family and region for one- or three-years terms

Key Benefits and Features of Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows Server:

Bring Your Own License: Customers can keep using their existing licenses after the migration process and reap the benefits of a cost-effective licensing strategy and avoid re-licensing costs.

Extensive and profound capabilities: Amazon Web Services offer over 350 Amazon EC2 instances where comparable services are simply unattainable from other cloud providers.

Higher reliability and performance: AWS has the broadest global infrastructure with 90 Availability Zones across 28 regions and 99.99% availability for each Amazon EC2 region. By moving the Windows workloads to AWS, customers can take advantage of massive reduction in unplanned downtime, faster deployment, and higher productivity.

Application and Database Modernization: Migrating Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon Aurora with AWS Database Migration service is quick, secure and minimizes downtime to applications. Amazon Aurora provides higher performance with extraordinary lower prices. Additionally, Aurora is one of AWS’ fully managed services. That is why, there is no need to make additional effort for management of the service.