In this blog post, we will show you how to automate the process of downgrading from Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise or Standard Edition to SQL Server Developer Edition to save costs.
Every day, customers benefit from cost savings, scalability, performance, and ease of management by running SQL Server on AWS. Implementing SQL Server Developer Edition is an excellent option for reducing the costs of running non-production workloads on AWS. The SQL Server Developer Edition is a free full-featured edition available for download on the Microsoft website. It is recommended for use in non-production environments such as development, testing, and staging.
In a previous blog post, we showed you how to manually implement SQL Server Developer Edition and downgrade from SQL Server Enterprise or Standard Edition to reduce costs. In this post, we provide a solution that automates the entire process at scale. If you have SQL Server Enterprise or Standard Edition running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), this solution automatically converts your non-production SQL Server environments to run on SQL Server Developer Edition. For Amazon EC2 instances running SQL Server Enterprise or Standard Edition with AWS-licensed, the solution also changes the license type of the EC2 instance to ensure correct billing. For more information on license type conversions, refer to the license conversion documentation.
The solution uses a combination of AWS CloudFormation and AWS Systems Manager Automation to automatically duplicate your non-production databases on SQL Server Developer Edition. The solution runs a series of PowerShell scripts delivered through SSM Run Command to change to SQL Server Developer Edition. It creates an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of the existing Amazon EC2 instance and runs the scripts on a new EC2 instance launched from that AMI.
The automation supports various configurations for source and target SQL Server editions. The source is always SQL Server Standard or Enterprise Edition, while the target is always SQL Server Developer Edition.
To use this solution, certain prerequisites must be met, such as the Amazon EC2 instance running SQL Server Enterprise or Standard Edition, SSM agent installed and running on the instance, the source SQL Server not being clustered, and having credentials for SQL Server with sysadmin role.
To begin the automation process, you need to store the SQL Server credentials in AWS Secrets Manager and create an automation document in Systems Manager. The automation document will execute the downgrade process for SQL Server.
Once the automation is set up, you can run it on an Amazon EC2 instance running SQL Server Enterprise or Standard Edition. The automation will downgrade the SQL Server to Developer Edition, and you can verify the results by logging in to the instance.
In conclusion, utilizing SQL Server Developer Edition for non-production environments can lead to significant cost savings. By automating the process of downgrading from Enterprise or Standard Edition to Developer Edition with Systems Manager, you can efficiently switch to Developer Edition at scale in your non-production environments to save on SQL Server licensing costs.
Article Source
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/modernizing-with-aws/how-to-automate-downgrading-sql-server-to-developer-edition-on-amazon-ec2/
