3 Reasons to move Windows, SQL and .NET Applications to AWS

CoAuthor: Aylton Souza

As many customers drive their Digital Transformation journey, legacy applications running Windows, SQL and .NET applications on-premises are still present as part of the existing footprint for customers of all sizes and might be missing out on the many benefits of moving them to the cloud. This article summarizes some of the top learnings I had working closely with customers. AWS offers a range of services and tools that can help you migrate and modernize your applications, while reducing costs, improving performance, and increasing agility.

In this article, I will highlight some of the key advantages of moving your Windows, SQL and .NET applications to AWS, and provide some resources for further learning.

Cost Savings

One of the main reasons to move your applications to the cloud is to save money. AWS can help you reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO) by offering lower and more flexible pricing models, such as pay-as-you-go, reserved instances, and spot instances. You can also save on licensing costs by using open source alternatives, such as Linux and Amazon Aurora, or by using AWS License Manager to optimize your license usage. If you are not familiar with the different ways to license and run Microsoft workloads in the cloud (like BYOL and License Included), I will add additional resources in the end of this article.

Customers from different industries and sizes can benefit from cost savings:

• A leading software company, has been running Windows workloads on AWS for over 10 years, and has reduced its TCO by 75%
• Another software giant, has over 10,000 Windows instances running on AWS, and has saved 50% on infrastructure costs.

Scalability and Performance

Another benefit of moving your applications to the cloud is to improve their scalability and performance. AWS offers a variety of instance types and sizes, as well as auto scaling and load balancing features, that can help you meet your changing demand and optimize your resource utilization. You can also leverage the global infrastructure of AWS, which spans 80 Availability Zones across 25 geographic regions, to deliver faster and more reliable service to your customers.

Thinking of performance and scalability, Infor, a global leader in business cloud software, has migrated its Windows file servers to Amazon FSx, a fully managed, native Microsoft Windows file system that provides shared file storage. By doing so, Infor improved its operational efficiency, reduced its downtime, and lowered its costs by 50%.

Innovation and Agility

A third benefit of moving your applications to the cloud is to increase your innovation and agility. AWS offers a range of services and tools that can help you modernize your applications, such as containers, serverless, microservices, and purpose-built databases. You can also use the AWS SDK for .NET to call many AWS cloud services from within your .NET code, and use AWS tools such as AWS App2Container, AWS Toolkit for .NET Refactoring, and AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET to simplify and accelerate your migration and modernization process.

A leading online food delivery platform in Latin America, has migrated its .NET applications to AWS, and has adopted a microservices-based architecture using Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Lambda. By doing so, they increased ?scalability, reduced its deployment time from hours to minutes, as well improved its customer experience.

Learn More

If you are interested in learning more about how to move your Windows, SQL and .NET applications to AWS, here are some articles from AWS that describe more details:

• Why you should migrate your Windows workloads with AWS (and how we can help): This article explains how AWS can help you access, develop, and manage your Windows services in the cloud, and how AWS can support you throughout your migration journey.
• Migrating .NET applications - AWS Prescriptive Guidance: This article provides an overview of the different options and best practices for hosting your .NET applications on AWS, and the tools that can help you migrate and modernize your .NET workloads.
• Migrating Microsoft SQL Server databases to the AWS Cloud: This article describes the options available for migrating SQL Server databases from on premises to the AWS Cloud, to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), or VMware Cloud on AWS.
• AWS License Manager and BYOL/License included articles?

I hope this article has given you some insights into the benefits of moving your Windows, SQL and .NET applications to AWS, and some resources for further learning

For more details about Windows Server 2012 End of Support and migration / modernization options, here is a recent article covering details (including BYOL and License Included):

https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7125595472534089728?]

For AWS License Manager details and addressing BYOL/License Included requirements: ?Digital Transformation and Legacy licensing and how to simplify cost management and complex licensing requirements (linkedin.com)

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