Is there an alternative to installing a domain controller on the EC2 cloud for administering users across all of your instances?

Question

We have a bunch of servers up on the Amazon EC2 cloud running Windows 2003 Server, and I was wondering if you knew of any ways (apart from a domain controller, which sounds like a pain to do on EC2) to administer users for all of the instances.

The use case here would be a terminated employee - I would love not to have to login and remove privileges for each running instance. I believe that installing AD, and running an instance as a domain controller will do the trick, but are there other ways?

Also, if you have experience on running a domain controller on the cloud, I'd love to hear from you as well!

Thank you everyone in advance! Lucas Ostrowski

Answer 1

If you want centralised account management in Windows then you are talking active directory, so you would need a domain controller.

You can, of course, write a few scripts yourself that can allow you to run them from a central point and allow them to remotely access and manage local accounts on each machine but you will need to deal with the fragility, accepted that a malicious employee may be able to get around these scripts and that there will be little real feedback from the account management scripts... but I suspect that by the time you've done this, you might as well have preferred the domain controller option.

Answer 2

Only thing I can think of is LDAP.

But we have one client with AD controller in EC2 and it works w/o any problems. Just allow all ports at this instance for all your other instances.