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AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Active Directory domain join for Windows Server environments

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now automatically joins Windows Server instances in your environment to an Active Directory domain managed with AWS Directory Service, eliminating the need for custom join scripts.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now automatically joins Windows Server instances in an environment to an Active Directory domain managed via AWS Directory Service. Previously, domain-joined Windows workloads required custom scripts to maintain. This feature joins all instances-including those launched later by auto scaling-to the domain at boot, before application deployment, with no custom scripts. Domain-joined instances can use Windows-integrated authentication, apply group policy, and access domain resources such as file shares and SQL Server databases. Instances are placed in an organizational unit for group policy targeting and receive predictable computer names derived from their instance IDs. The feature is resilient: if an instance cannot join the domain, deployment still completes and reports the issue, ensuring join failures never block deployment. This capability is available for Windows Server platform versions released on or after August 18, 2026, in all AWS Commercial Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions where Elastic Beanstalk is offered.

Why it matters

This update affects users running Windows applications on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, simplifying the management of domain-joined Windows workloads on the platform.

Read the original AWS announcement

Related articles and terms

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