A RAP "song" for our Top 14 new Window on AWS Announcements - A MUST Listen

We were excited to announce 14 new features for Windows on AWS! First the summary and then the RAP -- many thanks to Mark Royal for his rapping and compostition!

The ones we discussed in my reInvent Session are:

1. License Manager w/ BYOL and Dedicated Host Support. AWS License Manager is now integrated with Dedicated Hosts to provide a new management experience which brings the ease of use and elasticity of EC2 to Dedicated Hosts. This integration has made managing EC2 Dedicated Hosts easier than ever before. While you continue bringing own eligible licenses to AWS with EC2 Dedicated Hosts, you will now enjoy the simplicity and ease of use that you expect of the AWS Cloud. You can seamlessly launch virtual machines (instances) on Dedicated Hosts just like you launch an EC2 instance with AWS provided Windows licenses!

2. AWS Compute Optimizer uses machine learning models trained on millions of workloads to help customers optimize their compute resources for cost and performance across all of workloads they run. You can take advantage of the recommendations in Mettle to reduce costs by up to 25%.

3. HDD low cost storage with FSx: Building on the managed service offering of FSx for Windows in 2018, you can now select the right file storage type for your needs (HDD or SSD) – now at a low-cost price point of 2.5 cents!! 

4. AWS Single Sign-on (SSO): Enhanced SSO now includes the ability to not only choose MS Active Directory, but to support connection to Azure AD using standard protocals (SAML, SCIM) providing even more flexibility in your cloud strategy.

5. Image Builder. EC2 Image Builder provides a one-stop-shop to automate the building of compliant Windows and Linux images for use on AWS and on-premises at a regular cadence. It drastically reduces the work involved in this process by enabling customers to generate automated pipelines that produce compliant images. When software updates become available, EC2 Image Builder automatically produces a new image and distributes it to stipulated AWS regions after validating the results of tests run on it. Organizations can use EC2 Image Builder to capture security settings towards compliance policies as a template that can be consistently applied when building new images.

6. AWS Launch Wizard for SAP, AWS has launched AWS Launch Wizard for SQL and now we are announcing the preview of the SAP service to deploy HANA DB and NetWeaver on HANA DB for private and public sector. This is in private preview at re:Invent, and will be GA Q1’2020. Reach [email protected] for further question or to be part of beta testing.

7. MAP for Windows. We are announcing our plan to launch the Migration Acceleration Program for Windows (MAP for Windows) in Q1 2020. MAP for Windows utilizes the MAP framework and provides enhanced incentives to offset initial cost and technical assistance to customers in their journey to migrate or modernize Windows workloads to AWS.

8. End of Support Migration Program (EMP) for Windows Server. EMP for Windows Server is a AWS ProServe and Partner driven offering. It includes technology to package legacy applications (Windows Server 2003 and 2008) to run on newer versions of Windows Server without having to refactor.

9. Support for SQL Server 2019. Support for SQL Server 2019 both on Windows on AWS, and Linux on AWS.

10. Elastic Kubernetes Service GA. Knowing how important containers, and Kubernetes AND Windows are to you – we added Windows support in both Amazon Elastic Container Service and Kubernetes Service makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications on AWS.

11. gMSA support in ECS and EKS. We announced Group Managed Service Accounts (gMSA) support in ECS. You can run your .NET and Windows applications on ECS and EKS without having to worry about breaking Active Directory integration—making it a lot easier for you to modernize your existing applications.

12. App Modernization Lab. A Lab patterned after our Machine Learning Labs to help share best practices for .NET to serverless and containers.

13. AWS as a member of the .NET Foundation. AWS joins as Corporate Sponsor 2019 to improve Open Source support for .NET

14. AWS Data Exchange. AWS Data Exchange is a new service to make it easy for AWS customers to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud.