Amazon EC2 Now Supports Microsoft SQL Server 2017

The fine folks at over at Amazon have added support for Microsoft SQL Server 2017 on EC2 instances, making the most recent release of the platform available to cloud users.

With this release, developers can set up Microsoft SQL Server 2017 workloads on AWS, and take advantage of the scale, performance, and elasticity that the Amazon Web Services cloud offers for these performance intensive applications.

Amazon announced this support earlier this month, confirming that it is available in all AWS regions.

Microsoft released this latest version of its SQL Server on October 2, and Amazon added in support for it just a couple of days later on October 4.

Deploying SQL Server databases on AWS provides users the benefit of using all the security capabilities that the cloud platform offers — with technologies like Amazon VPC, data encryption, and integration with AWS Microsoft AD for role based access control.

It also allows them to leveraging security enhancements that Microsoft has provided in SQL Server 2017, including additions like Always-Encrypted, dynamic data masking, and row-level security.

Developers now have the capability to easily integrate their SQL Server deployment with other AWS services like AWS CloudFormation, Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, and AWS CloudWatch to allow for streamlined deployment, management, monitoring, and other administrative tasks.

In addition to all this, running SQL Server 2017 on Amazon EC2 instances, brings access to all the latest features that are available in Microsoft SQL Server 2017 like container support, as well as support for DevOps scenarios, graph databases, automatic database tuning, along with R and Python analytics.