Amazon EC2 instances now support Microsoft SQL Server 2017

Posted on: Oct 4, 2017

Amazon EC2 now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2017, the most recent release of Microsoft SQL Server. With this release, your Microsoft SQL Server 2017 workloads can take advantage of the scale, performance, and elasticity of the AWS Cloud. You can deploy SQL Server 2017 Always-On Availability Groups across multiple AWS Availability Zones (“AZs”) for enhanced availability and data durability. When you deploy your SQL Server databases on AWS, they benefit from all the security capabilities from AWS such as Amazon VPC, data encryption, and integration with AWS Microsoft AD for role based access control, while also leveraging security enhancements provided in SQL Server 2017 such as Always-Encrypted, dynamic data masking, and row-level security. You can integrate your SQL Server deployment with other AWS services such as AWS CloudFormation, Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, and AWS CloudWatch to provide easy deployment, management, monitoring, and other administrative tasks. These capabilities help ensure your SQL Server deployments meet your performance, manageability, security, and availability requirements while benefitting from the scale and agility of the AWS Cloud. In addition, when you run SQL Server 2017 on Amazon EC2 instances, you can take advantage of all the latest features available in Microsoft SQL Server 2017 such as container support for DevOps scenarios, graph databases, automatic database tuning, as well as R and Python analytics.

SQL Server 2017 is available from today in all AWS regions. You can launch your SQL Server 2017 instances on-demand using Amazon EC2 Windows Server 2016 License Included (LI) AMIs directly from the EC2 console, or the AWS Marketplace and are available in four editions – SQL Server Web Edition, SQL Server Express Edition, SQL Server Standard Edition, and SQL Server Enterprise Edition. You can also bring your own SQL Server 2017 licenses (BYOL) to EC2 Windows, EC2 Linux instances, or to Docker containers running in Amazon EC2.