Updated Solutions to Classic Challenges
A personal website dedicated to helping IT professionals review where we've been, where we are, and maybe where we are headed.
Amazon Web Services offers several services which are region specific. When encountering an error, the first thing you should do is validate that you are operating in the correct region(s). This was an issue I ran into recently when using CloudFormation.
Read MoreI recently had an experience which underscored for me the power of AWS CloudFormation. My test lab is almost exclusively run in the cloud now. So when I need to demo things before discussing them with a customer, I build environments in AWS. One such environment was for SQL Server 2016. The original idea was to use Windows Server 2012 as the OS with SQL Server 2016 as the database platform. The customer recently decided that we should look at Windows Server 2016 as the OS instead.
I was able to adjust to the customer's request by altering two lines of code - one per EC2 instance. That's it! Just two lines of code, and I could redeploy the whole setup. The only lines that needed to be updated were the ones referencing the ImageId property. Previously, I would have built these servers in VMware workstation or Hyper-V and it would have taken a few hours. Now, it's just minutes.
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I recently created an Amazon EC2 CloudFormation template to automate the build out of a Windows Server with SQL Server pre-installed. The template came from an official Amazon/Microsoft ami in the Amazon Marketplace. Since this was for a simple proof-of-concept test, I wanted to use the t2.medium type, which I've used for various other projects. The t2.medium instance type usually provides a reasonable value in terms of price to performance. Upon execution of the CF Template, I noticed the template rolled back. When I looked for an error, it read "Microsoft SQL Server is not supported for the instance type 't2.medium'."
The error threw me for a minute, but then I ran a quick google search and it came back with a few hits. I wasn't the first person to hit this error. I found the page defining the Windows Server 2012 with SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition. That page can be found here (https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B01H4DL45A?qid=1518460124383&sr=0-1&ref_=srh_res_product_title) . The page lists all supported instance types. My favorite, the t2.medium was not among them. I instead chose to use the m4.medium, and the template ran to completion as expected. The moral of the story - always check the documentation.
At the time of this writing, the full list of supported EC2 Instance Types for Windows Server 2012R2 with SQL Server 2016 Standard is:
m1.small
m1.medium
m1.large
m1.xlarge
m2.xlarge
m2.2xlarge
m2.4xlarge
m3.medium
m3.large
m3.xlarge
m3.2xlarge
m4.large
m4.xlarge
m4.2xlarge
m4.4xlarge
m4.10xlarge
m4.16xlarge
m5.large
m5.xlarge
m5.2xlarge
m5.4xlarge
m5.12xlarge
m5.24xlarge
c1.xlarge
c3.large
c3.xlarge
c3.2xlarge
c3.4xlarge
c3.8xlarge
c4.large
c4.xlarge
c4.2xlarge
c4.4xlarge
c4.8xlarge
c5.large
c5.xlarge
c5.2xlarge
c5.4xlarge
c5.9xlarge
c5.18xlarge
cc2.8xlarge
cg1.4xlarge
cr1.8xlarge
x1.16xlarge
x1.32xlarge
x1e.xlarge
x1e.2xlarge
x1e.4xlarge
x1e.8xlarge
x1e.16xlarge
x1e.32xlarge
r3.large
r3.xlarge
r3.2xlarge
r3.4xlarge
r3.8xlarge
r4.large
r4.xlarge
r4.2xlarge
r4.4xlarge
r4.8xlarge
r4.16xlarge
g2.2xlarge
h1.2xlarge
h1.4xlarge
h1.8xlarge
h1.16xlarge
hs1.8xlarge
i2.xlarge
i2.2xlarge
i2.4xlarge
i2.8xlarge
i3.large
i3.xlarge
i3.2xlarge
i3.4xlarge
i3.8xlarge
i3.16xlarge