Cloudnexa has received formal recognition of our Microsoft Workloads on AWS Service Delivery by AWS. This important recognition validates our technical expertise and experience on running Microsoft workloads on AWS. Cloudnexa not only knows how to effectively manage Microsoft workloads on AWS, we are also skilled in migrating and optimizing them.

What is the AWS Service Delivery Program?

The program validates that AWS partners have a deep understanding of AWS services, demonstrated experience, and proven customer success.

The AWS Service Delivery Program is designed to validate AWS Partners that have a deep understanding of AWS services, demonstrated experience, and proven customer success in delivering these services to customers.

AWS Partners are technically validated for having experience delivering and providing consultancy on specific AWS services to our customers. From helping customers run serverless code with AWS Lambda to deploying managed, secure, reliable, and high-performing, Windows-based solutions on Amazon EC2 Windows, AWS Service Delivery Partners are equipped to assist AWS customers with specific AWS services.

How does this benefit our clients?

Cloudnexa has the right expertise and tools to help our clients seamlessly migrate and modernize their Microsoft workloads on the cloud.

With over a decade of unmatched experience, Cloudnexa has the right expertise and tools to help our clients seamlessly migrate and modernize their Microsoft workloads on the cloud. Clients can gain access to a broad selection of services with deep functionality and lower the overall costs of running their Microsoft workloads. Clients can increase or decrease capacity within minutes—not hours or days—and commission one, hundreds, or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Clients can get stronger security, faster performance, and greater reliability with globally dispersed Availability Zones and fewer downtime hours.

Key benefits include:

• Take advantage of the breadth of security, compliance, and governance services for safely running your Microsoft workloads on AWS.
• Gain access to a broader selection of services with deeper functionality and globally disbursed Availability Zones for greater reliability when you migrate your Microsoft workloads to AWS.
• Leverage Amazon EC2 instances compatible with your Microsoft workloads and configurations to meet your price-to-performance requirements.

Want to learn how we can help you? Contact us.

I’m excited to announce that AWS has renewed Cloudnexa’s Premier Partner status. Cloudnexa has one of the longest tenures as an AWS Premier partner in the industry as we’ve been a Premier partner continuously since 2013. This continues to bring many fantastic benefits to our clients.

What does it mean to be an AWS Premier Partner?

AWS Premier Tier Partners are the most experienced AWS Consulting Partners and are recognized as leaders.

AWS has three partner tiers: Select, Advanced, and Premier. The Premier status is the most challenging status to achieve in the AWS partner network. AWS Premier Tier Partners are the most experienced AWS Consulting Partners and are recognized as leaders in their respective geographical, vertical, or horizontal markets. The AWS Premier Tier Partners have deep technical expertise with multiple Partner program validations and demonstrated success working with a larger number of AWS customers at scale in deploying solutions on AWS.

AWS Premier partners have to:

• Meet AWS certification requirements for engineers.
• Show rapid client growth.
• Demonstrate new business recurring revenue year-over-year.
• Achieve high customer satisfaction levels, including new public reference customers.

Premier partners go through an AWS executive-level selection process and work closely with the entire AWS Partner Executive Team to prove their capabilities over at least a 6-month period. Less than 1% of partners achieve the AWS Premier Partner Tier status worldwide!

How do our clients benefit from our AWS Premier Partner status?

Less than 1% of AWS partners achieve the AWS Premier Partner Tier status worldwide.

Cloudnexa clients benefit from our AWS Premier Partner status in the following ways:

• Validated trust: AWS has thoroughly validated Cloudnexa’s capabilities, so clients have peace of mind that they are in the right hands, whether they’re migrating to the cloud or optimizing their environment.
• Additional AWS funding: Cloudnexa has more AWS funding capabilities available which saves our clients money.
• Client advocacy: Cloudnexa is in a strong position to advocate for our clients as we have AWS executive relationship sponsorships. We can escalate issues when needed to ensure resolution for our clients.
• Early Adopter Program: Cloudnexa can also help our customers get early access to AWS services through AWS’ Early Adopter Program.
• Knowledge and expertise: Cloudnexa has extensive knowledge and expertise from a rapidly growing client base to share best practices and guide clients effectively on their journey.

Learn more about how we can help you by contacting us.

Need to lower your cloud costs? Want to optimize your licensing agreement costs, but not sure how? You can save thousands of dollars through Cloudnexa’s trusted guidance.

AWS Spend Optimization

There are a lot of wasted costs in most IT environments. These include end of life, overprovisioning, underutilizing, orphaned resources, upgrade options, time, and commitment. When you meet with Cloudnexa, we will help you identify immediate cost savings as well as longer-term cost savings in these categories.

Lowering Cloud Spend

Clients typically save 20%-60% through Cloudnexa’s strategic guidance.

To lower cloud spend, the first step is to evaluate your current IT environment. The following are key categories that we will review with you to identify potential cost savings:

• End of life (EOL): There are two categories to assess end of life—Service and Software. For Service EOL, it’s important to evaluate sunsetting sizing as AWS offerings are continually updating. Some instances are EOL and are more expensive to run. It’s important to reassess to lower costs. For Software EOL, products may be under an old licensing agreement that is no longer valid and making changes can save you money.
• Overprovisioning: When companies have an issue in their infrastructure, they often use hardware or services to solve the issue rather than identifying the root cause and solving the problem. This leads to an overprovisioned environment. We will help you identify if this is the case with your environment.
• Underutilizing: Things change over time. Companies may have provisioned a certain number of instances, but might not be using all of them currently. Whatever you provision, you pay for. Cloudnexa will help you look for underutilized provisioning.
• Orphaned resources: When companies are busy, it’s easy to forget about resources. For example, you may have spun up some instances for testing. While you no longer need them for operations, they may still be running. We will help identify these orphaned resources.
• Upgrade Options: Who doesn’t love upgrades? Leveraging the newest AWS offering within a service may increase performance and lower costs. Cloudnexa will provide trusted guidance for these key decisions.
• Time: Time is one of the most precious commodities in the IT world. Doing these checks yourself usually takes longer and can lead to wasted savings. Leveraging Cloudnexa’s expertise will ensure that you start saving faster.
• Commitment: Making AWS commitments can save you money. But how to commit and the commitment amount is much more complex. Cloudnexa can review AWS savings plans and reserved instances, making sure you commit to the correct commitment levels to save money. We typically see clients save 20-50% instantly by committing to appropriate levels.

Optimizing Licensing Costs

Is your licensing agreement up for renewal? Go through a Cloudnexa review before you make any decisions. Optimized License Assessments (OLAs) save customers on average 38% of their licensing costs by right sizing their existing licenses. Running unsupported technology causes compliance issues, and custom support agreements are a costly way for customers to remain in compliance.

Cloudnexa can help you optimize your licensing costs by completing a review to ensure you purchase the proper number of cores. We can help you optimize the licenses that you’re using. Our neutral, third-party reviews include:

• Microsoft enterprise and licensing agreements to understand license rule changes and impacts.
• Leverage industry-leading tools to collect data and assess measurements.
• Analysis of existing on-prem and AWS licensing positions and impacts.

Our OLA process is as follows:

• Collect: Determine prospective customer workloads to optimize and collect utilization data for the underlying workloads.
• Analyze: Analyze the data to model cost and licensing optimization scenarios.
• Plan: Review the results and build a business case or start a migration proof of concept.

Well Architected Review

An AWS Well-Architected Review helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. Based on five pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization—an AWS Well-Architected Review provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures and implement designs that can scale over time.

Framework Overview

The AWS Well-Architected Framework describes the key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud. By answering a set of foundational questions, you learn how well your architecture aligns with cloud best practices and are provided guidance for making improvements.

Cost Optimization Pillar

The cost optimization pillar focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs. Key topics include understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types, analyzing spend over time, and scaling to meet business needs without overspending.

How to Start Saving Money

Customers who have engaged Cloudnexa have realized significant cost savings, improved their application performance, and eliminated risks.

Cloudnexa is an AWS Well-Architected Program partner and has in-depth training on the Well-Architected Framework. We can help you implement best practices, measure the state of your workloads, and make improvements where assistance is required. Customers who have engaged Cloudnexa have realized significant cost savings, improved the performance of their applications, and eliminated security risks and other high-risk issues.

We want our customers to have the best possible experience with cloud solutions. Follow our review process to make an informed decision:

Learn more at https://www.cloudnexa.com/cloud-services/well-architected-reviews/ or schedule your review by contacting us.

Deploying and managing SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instances (FCIs) in the cloud has traditionally required third-party software and a lot of overhead … until now. With the introduction of Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, we have a simple, AWS-native option for integrating fully managed, highly available shared storage to host our SQL databases.

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As part of the SQL Server Always On offering, Always On Failover Cluster Instances (FCIs) leverage Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) functionality to provide local high availability through redundancy at the server-instance level – namely a failover cluster instance (FCI). An FCI is a single instance of SQL Server that is installed across WSFC nodes, typically across multiple subnets and Availability Zones (AZs) in AWS. On the network, the FCI appears to be an instance of SQL Server running on a single computer. But the FCI actually provides failover from one WSFC node to another, if the active node becomes unavailable.

The SQL Server Always On FCI deployment option has been traditionally difficult to deploy and manage on AWS due to the shared storage requirement (shared storage needs to be accessible from all participating nodes). To get around this, a common deployment approach involved integrating third-party replication solutions such as SIOS DataKeeper or StarWind Virtual SAN, which allowed us to build the SQL Server cluster by simulating shared storage (disk data on the primary node was replicated to the secondary node). The solutions integrated with and extended WSFC functionality to manifest the FCI deployment scenario in AWS, but with increased management, overhead, and cost.

The introduction of AWS FSx for Windows File Server is a game changer. This fully managed service provides shared storage, can automatically replicate the data synchronously across two Availability Zones and provide high availability with automatic failure detection, failover and failback, and fully supports the SMB Continuous Availability (CA) feature. You can use Amazon FSx for Windows File Server as a shared storage tier for FCIs in two ways: as an SMB File Share Witness, and/or for Active SQL Server Data Files.

Using Amazon FSx as an SMB File Share Witness – WSFC deployments commonly deploy an SMB file share witness to maintain quorum of the cluster’s resources. The job of the witness is to provide an additional quorum vote when necessary to ensure that a cluster continues to run if there is a site outage. The witness file share can run on a Single-AZ file system and requires only a small amount of storage (32 GB should be sufficient) to hold quorum information (see diagram below).

Using Amazon FSx for Active SQL Server Data Files – Microsoft SQL Server can be deployed with an SMB file share as the storage option for active data files. Amazon FSx is optimized to provide shared storage by supporting continuously available (CA) file shares, which are specifically designed for applications like SQL Server that require uninterrupted access to shared file data. Note that it is required that you use CA shares on Multi-AZ file systems for all SQL Server deployments, whether HA or not. Amazon FSx provides file shares with the following characteristics and capabilities to host SQL Server databases:

• Support for SMB versions 2.0 through 3.1.1.
• Encryption in transit using SMB Kerberos.
• Customizable performance (throughput and IOPS).
• Multi-AZ deployment (HA) with support for SMB Continuous Availability (also known as SMB Transparent Failover).
• Predictable cost with no charge for Inter-AZ data replication.
• Single-AZ file system can be used as a target for SQL backups.

Configuration

The configuration of this setup is also significantly less complex than previous deployment methodologies. You can follow these high-level steps as a general guide:

1. Create your domain-joined, Multi-AZ Amazon FSx file system.
2. Determine your required file system characteristics.
3. Determine applicable network settings.
4. Select your Active Directory.
5. Create the Microsoft SQL Server file share on your file system and set proper permissions and availability settings.
6. Map a share (eg. D$) using the FSx systems’ DNS name and create a folder (eg. SQL) within it.
7. Sett the ContinuouslyAvailable property of the file share to “True”.
8. Grant SMB share permissions to the appropriate identities (the SQL service account, a global group for DBAs, and another Global Group in which all SQL Servers are members).
9. Edit and set NTFS permissions, granting “Full Access” to the target folder to the same set of identities (the SQL service account, a global group for DBAs, and another Global Group in which all SQL Servers are members).
10. Install SQL Server as failover cluster instance on the first node.
11. Install SQL Server as failover cluster instance on the second node.

Benefits

There are several benefits in migrating to Amazon FSx for shared SQL storage which can apply to customers in many different use cases. Consider these scenarios:

• Customers who use Enterprise Edition licenses to support AG groups can now use Standard Edition licenses which will save ~50–60% in license costs, not to mention simplifying the complexity and ongoing management of the SQL deployment (although you can run Basic AGs on SQL Server Standard Edition starting from SQL Server 2016, only one database per AG is supported which becomes a challenge when reconciling multiple databases, listeners and private IPs, EC2 instance type and ENI private IP constraints, etc.).
• Customers with third-party storage replication solutions, will be able to save on licensing, administration and support, while simplifying and consolidating their technology footprint by using another AWS native service instead.
• Customers with existing on-premise or hybrid deployments are likely using a combination of FCI and AG (FCI for high availability within a primary data center site, and AG to provide a disaster recovery solution across sites). AWS’s Availability Zone architecture and Amazon FSx’s support for highly available shared storage deployed across multiple Availability Zones now make it possible for them to eliminate the need for separate high availability and disaster recovery solutions, again reducing costs and simplifying deployment complexities.

For additional information on the technologies referenced in this article, please feel free to contact us directly. You can also reference this links:

https://aws.amazon.com/sql/

https://aws.amazon.com/fsx/windows/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/fsx/latest/WindowsGuide/sql-server.html

https://www.sios-apac.com/tag/sql-server-failover-cluster-instance/

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-aws-ec2-deployment-guide/