Running the most reliable choice for Windows workloads: Windows on AWS

Some of you may not know, but AWS began supporting Microsoft Windows workloads on AWS in 2008—over 11 years ago. Year over year, we have released exciting new services and enhancements based on feedback from customers like you. AWS License Manager and Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights for .NET and SQL Server are just some of the recent examples. The rate and pace of innovation is eye-popping.

In addition to innovation, one of the key areas that companies value is the reliability of the cloud platform. I recently chatted with David Sheehan, DevOps engineer at eMarketer. He told me, “Our move from Azure to AWS improved the performance and reliability of our microservices in addition to significant cost savings.” If a healthcare clinic can’t connect to the internet, then it’s possible that they can’t deliver care to their patients. If a bank can’t process transactions because of an outage, they could lose business.

In 2018, the next-largest cloud provider had almost 7x more downtime hours than AWS per data pulled directly from the public service health dashboards of the major cloud providers. It is the reason companies like Edwards Lifesciences chose AWS. They are a global leader in patient-focused medical innovations for structural heart disease, as well as critical care and surgical monitoring. Rajeev Bhardwaj, the senior director for Enterprise Technology, recently told me, “We chose AWS for our data center workloads, including Windows, based on our assessment of the security, reliability, and performance of the platform.”

There are several reasons as to why AWS delivers a more reliable platform for Microsoft workloads but I would like to focus on two here: designing for reliability and scaling within a Region.

Reason #1—It’s designed for reliability

AWS has significantly better reliability than the next largest cloud provider, due to our fundamentally better global infrastructure design based on Regions and Availability Zones. The AWS Cloud spans 64 zones within 21 geographic Regions around the world. We’ve announced plans for 12 more zones and four more Regions in Bahrain, Cape Town, Jakarta, and Milan.

Look at networking capabilities across five key areas: security, global coverage, performance, manageability, and availability. AWS has made deep investments in each of these areas over the past 12 years. We want to ensure that AWS has the networking capabilities required to run the world’s most demanding workloads.

There is no compression algorithm for experience. From running the most extensive, reliable, and secure global cloud infrastructure technology platform, we’ve learned that you care about the availability and performance of your applications. You want to deploy applications across multiple zones in the same Region for fault tolerance and latency.

I want to take a moment to emphasize that our approach to building our network is fundamentally different from our competitors, and that difference matters. Each of our Regions is fully isolated from all other Regions. Unlike virtually every other cloud provider, each AWS Region has multiple zones and data centers. These zones are a fully isolated partition of our infrastructure that contains up to eight separate data centers.

The zones are connected to each other with fast, private fiber-optic networking, enabling you to easily architect applications that automatically fail over between zones without interruption. With their own power infrastructure, the zones are physically separated by a meaningful distance, many kilometers, from any other zone. You can partition applications across multiple zones in the same Region to better isolate any issues and achieve high availability.

The AWS control plane (including APIs) and AWS Management Console are distributed across AWS Regions. They use a Multi-AZ architecture within each Region to deliver resilience and ensure continuous availability. This ensures that you avoid having a critical service dependency on a single data center.

While other cloud vendors claim to have Availability Zones, they do not have the same stringent requirements for isolation between zones, leading to impact across multiple zones. Furthermore, AWS has more zones and more Regions with support for multiple zones than any other cloud provider. This design is why the next largest cloud provider had almost 7x more downtime hours in 2018 than AWS.

Reason #2—Scale within a Region

We also designed our services into smaller cells that scale out within a Region, as opposed to a single-Region instance that scales up. This approach reduces the blast radius when there is a cell-level failure. It is why AWS—unlike other providers—has never experienced a network event spanning multiple Regions.

AWS also provides the most detailed information on service availability via the Service Health Dashboard, including Regions affected, services impacted, and downtime duration. AWS keeps a running log of all service interruptions for the past year. Finally, you can subscribe to an RSS feed to be notified of interruptions to each individual service.

Reliability matters

Running Windows workloads on AWS means that you not only get the most innovative cloud, but you also have the most reliable cloud as well.

For example, Mary Kay is one of the world’s leading direct sellers of skin care products and cosmetics. They have tens of thousands of employees and beauty consultants working outside the office, so the IT system is fundamental for the success of their company.

Mary Kay used Availability Zones and Microsoft Active Directory to architect their applications on AWS. AWS Microsoft Managed AD provides Mary Kay the features that enabled them to deploy SQL Server Always On availability groups on Amazon EC2 Windows. This configuration gave Mary Kay the control to scale their deployment out to meet their performance requirements. They were able to deploy the service in multiple Regions to support users worldwide. Their on-premises users get the same experience when using Active Directory–aware services, either on-premises or in the AWS Cloud.

Now, with our cross-account and cross-VPC support, Mary Kay is looking at reducing their managed Active Directory infrastructure footprint, saving money and reducing complexity. But this identity management system must be reliable and scalable as well as innovative.

Fugro is a Dutch multinational public company headquartered in the Netherlands. They provide geotechnical, survey, subsea, and geoscience services for clients, typically oil and gas, telecommunications cable, and infrastructure companies. Fugro leverages the cloud to support the delivery of geo-intelligence and asset management services for clients globally in industries including onshore and offshore energy, renewables, power, and construction.

As I was chatting with Scott Carpenter, the global cloud architect for Fugro, he said, “Fugro is also now in the process of migrating a complex ESRI ArcGIS environment from an existing cloud provider to AWS. It is going to centralize and accelerate access from existing AWS hosted datasets, while still providing flexibility and interoperability to external and third-party data sources. The ArcGIS migration is driven by a focus on providing the highest level of operational excellence.”

With AWS, you don’t have to be concerned about reliability. AWS has the reliability and scale that drives innovation for Windows applications running in the cloud. And the same reliability that makes it best for your Windows applications is the same reliability that makes AWS the best cloud for all your applications.

Let AWS help you assess how your company can get the most out of cloud. Join all the AWS customers that trust us to run their most important applications in the best cloud. To have us create an assessment for your Windows applications or all your applications, email us at BetterTCO@amazon.com.