To create an SQL server instance in AWS, you need an AWS account. creating an AWS account is straightforward so I'm going to assume you already have one.
Login into the AWS console and you'll get the main page:
Now we are going to expand the All Services drop and select RDS
with this we end up in the RDS database management page. Once here you can notice the "Additional Information" panel on the right of the page, with links to the relevant documentation. We are now going to click on the button "Launch a DB Instance"
In the resulting page, we are going to select "Microsoft SQL Server" as Engine option, and SQL Server Express Edition (the only available for free accounts)
After clicking on Next, we get the "Specify DB details" step
I chose SQL server 2014 version because I had that version of SQL management studio installed in my PC. Later in this same page we have the settings
I used sapassword for password. The next page is about advanced settings. In this example I left the default unchanged for that page. Therefore, simply scroll down and click on the "Launch DB Instance" button.
Once done, we are forwarded to the status page for the instance that shows creating as status
It takes a while (several minutes in my case) to complete the creation process; at the end the status changes from creating to available. Since this occurs, Below the summary pane we can browse several other panes that report configuration parameters and statistics for the service instance we just created.
Conclusion
Our AWS backed-up SQL server instance is now ready to be used. In the next post we'll see how to create a new database in this instance. The beauty of this is that we have a SQL server database available, that AWS will completely manage for us. The only thing we need is an internet connection. No on premises hardware to buy and install, no local networking to configure, no SQL server software to install and configure.