Overview
A small platform team can run SQL Server well until the pager rota, the patch calendar and the restore tests compete with product work. This scenario describes how AceMQ's Tier 3 managed SQL Server runs in an account the customer owns.
Challenge
The platform team ran its customer-facing database on SQL Server in an availability group on EC2 instances. Cumulative updates slipped, restores were never tested, and incidents at night fell on two engineers who also owned product delivery.
Environment
SQL Server on Windows Server EC2 instances in the customer's AWS account, one availability group, log backups to object storage, customer-owned licences, and a change process the customer's security team controls.
Approach
Onboarding starts with an assessment of version and patch position, backups and restore history, availability group health, configuration and monitoring gaps. Active risks are fixed, then AceMQ takes the pager under the contracted SLA, working through the customer's access controls and change process, with all changes logged.
Solution
- Assessed patch level, backup chain, restore evidence, CHECKDB history and availability group configuration before taking over
- Set up monitoring for waits, blocking, log reuse, replica synchronization and failed jobs, routed to AceMQ's on-call
- Scheduled restore tests into a scratch environment and recorded the results
- Planned cumulative updates through a test copy first, with rollback steps written down
- Kept runbooks and topology documentation as the customer's property for a clean handover
Outcome
The engagement delivers an assessed estate, active risks remediated, monitoring and on-call run by AceMQ, scheduled restore tests with recorded results, and a patch calendar the customer can show an auditor. The customer's data, accounts and licences stay with the customer throughout.
Kafka
Amazon RDS
Prometheus
