AWS bids for cloudy SharePoint

Own experiences translated into how-to guide

Amazon Web Services wants your SharePoint rig in its cloud and has released a white paper telling you how to do it, fast, with Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008.

The rationale for the move involves the usual cloud spiel of opex not capex, fast implementation time thanks to the removal of mucky jobs like installing hardware, and of course elasticity.

But the IaaS giant also points out that Microsoft makes the move easy thanks to the Licence Mobility program which allows licence holders to transfer licences into clouds operated by authorised partners.

Which is not to say the move to the Amazon cloud will be easy. The Microsoft SharePoint on AWS Reference Architecture White Paper says that a cloudy implementation of SharePoint for an intranet will require:

• Amazon VPC, with VPN connection to the corporate data center
• Private subnets only, connected to the corporate network via VPN
• At least two Availability Zones used to survive the low probability of an Availability Zone failure
• Elastic load balancers across web front­‐end servers
• SQL Server in mirrored configuration across Availability Zones
• Database (Amazon EBS volume) snapshots

A public-facing implementation will also need a threat management gateway, a bastion host, multiple web servers, a hefty SQL Server rig and Active Directory Domain controllers.

If you're still up for that much cloud, the paper points out that it is based on Amazon's' own pain experiences setting up SharePoint for internal use. ®