Why AWS is the best place for your Windows workloads, and how Microsoft is changing their licensing to try to awkwardly force you into Azure

Many companies today are considering how to migrate to the cloud to take advantage of the agility and innovation that the cloud brings. Having the right to choose the best provider for your business is critical.

AWS is the best cloud for running your Windows workloads and our experience running Windows applications has earned our customers’ trust. It’s been more than 10 years since AWS first made it possible for customers to run their Windows workloads on AWS—longer than Azure has even been around, and according to a report by IDC, we host nearly two times as many Windows Server instances in the cloud as Microsoft. And more and more enterprises are entrusting their Windows workloads to AWS because of its greater reliability, higher performance, and lower cost, with the number of AWS enterprise customers using AWS for Windows Server growing more than 400% in the past three years.

In fact, we are seeing a trend of customers moving from Azure to AWS. eMarketer started their digital transformation with Azure, but found performance challenges and higher costs that led them to migrate all of their workloads over to AWS. Why did they migrate? They found a better experience, stronger support, higher availability, and better performance, with 4x faster launch times and 35% lower costs compared to Azure. Ancestry, a leader in consumer genomics, went all-in on development in the cloud moving 10 PB data and 400 Windows-based applications in less than 9 months. They also modernized to Linux with .NET Core and leveraged advanced technologies including serverless and containers. With results like that, you can see why organizations like Sysco, Edwards Life Sciences, Expedia, and NextGen Healthcare have chosen AWS to upgrade, migrate, and modernize their Windows workloads.

We also have seen many companies use their migration to the cloud as a chance to modernize their IT and break free from the old guard vendors. This is really prevalent in the database industry where customers are flocking to Amazon Aurora, the relational database built for the cloud. And Microsoft’s announcements earlier this week certainly seem like they’ve been taken from the old guard software vendor playbook. First – trying to put an end to Bring Your Own License (BYOL) for Windows Server purchased after October 1, 2019. In case you didn’t catch it, the announcement restricted customers’ ability to bring their own, purchased licenses to their preferred cloud, including AWS, when using licenses purchased after October 1, 2019, or running future versions of Windows Server released after that date. Second, Microsoft is trying to limit your choice around SQL Server. For example, if you are running SQL Server on the AWS cloud with Dedicated Host without Software Assurance (SA) (which is allowed today) and want to upgrade to a newer version after October 1, you would be required to purchase a new SQL Server license with SA. Despite these changes, AWS will continue to provide you the best platform with multiple options to run Windows Server and SQL Server to fit your business needs.

Now, while these changes might not seem as restrictive as yet another threat of a software audit, this isn’t the first time Microsoft has made “subtle” changes to its licensing that are slowly chipping away at your options. In 2018, Microsoft removed customer’s rights to bring your SQL Server licenses to AWS and use them with our managed service, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). The cloud enables your company’s agility and innovation. Do you really want to bring along the licensing baggage of the old world, especially if those rights continue to change? At AWS, our goal is to provide our customers with choice. Microsoft wants you to believe that this is just “removal of outsourcing rights”, but Microsoft is looking to restrict what computer you can use. And what cloud.

 If you are interested in seeing your cost savings over running on-premises or over running on Azure,  send us an email at [email protected] or visit why AWS is the best cloud for Windows.