Azure AD and AWS Managed Microsoft AD side-by-side

In my previous post, I’ve made a subjective comparison between AWS Cognito and Azure AD. I took into consideration only the features that I was directly interested in.

In this post, I want to summarise what are the main differences between Azure AD and AWS Managed Microsoft AD. Why? Because on AWS, the documentation related to what are features of AD available inside AWS Managed Microsoft AD is limited, and you cannot find a clear statement. Some of the cases I had to spin-up a service instance and check manually if a feature is available or not.

First of all remember that the Azure AD is the last version of AD that Microsoft has, full-featured. In comparison, AWS is offering a ‘legacy’ instance, with features that are available inside the on-premises AD deployments. Because of this, the features available inside AWS Managed Microsoft AD is just a subset of the ones available inside Azure AD.

The question that we need to answer is WHICH ARE THE ONES…

The below tables covers the most important features of AD and some differences between them. You might notice that in some cases Azure AD does not support the full features. This happens because some legacy part of on-premises AD versions were removed or are not suitable for an IAM solution hosted inside the cloud.

Item	Azure AD	AWS Managed Microsoft AD
Price model	No. of DO (Directory Objects)	No. of DC (Domain Controllers)
Custom DNS	Yes	Yes
Snapshots	No, because it is a SaaS	Yes
No of managed forests	1 for each Azure AD tenant	10 for each account
Trusts	No	Limited
Schema extensions	No	Limited
Log access to DC	No (because it is a SaaS)	Yes
Max no. of DC	SaaS – not relevant	20 for each directory
Connection with on-premises	VNET only	Direct Connect or VPN
LDAPS support	Yes	Yes
Kerberos support	Yes	Yes
LDAPS	Read-only, Write available only for managed domain	Read and Write (~not easy)
LDAP CS	All (AES 128 & 265, RC4, 3DES)	All (AES 128 & 265, RC4, 3DES)
Kerberos Encryption	All (AES 128 & 265, RC4, 3DES)	All (AES 128 & 265, RC4, 3DES)
LDAP Protocol	TLS 1.0, TLS 1.2 (SSLv3 not supported anymore)	SSLv3, TLS 1.0, TLS 1.2
Smart Card	No, because of SaaS and limitation of integration with on-premises solutions	RADIUS only
Directory Synchronization	Yes	No
Password policies	Yes	Yes
NTLM	Yes, NTLM v1 and v2	Yes, NTLM v1 and v2
Kerberos Delegation	Resource-based	Resource and Account-based
Managed Service	Yes	No
Secure deployments	Yes	Partial
Domain administrator privileges	No	Partial
Domain join	No	Yes
Schema extensions	Not directly	Yes
Group policy	Yes	Yes
Graph API	Yes	No

What is important to remember is that when you use Azure AD, you are using managed services, full-featured. In comparison when using the AWS Managed Microsoft AD you receive a service that has behind a scene EC2s with Windows Server AD configured on them. The services is managed as a set of VMs, not as a fully managed service. Based on the documentation that I was able to find, it seems that AWS is deploying the service using Microsoft Windows Server 2016.

AWS Managed Microsoft AD is a good option when your solution is running inside AWS, and you don’t have in plans to migrate to Office365 or to use Azure. Even so, once you start to use the AWS Managed Microsoft AD, you can migrate to Azure AD or do a federation with it.

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