Ways to join an Amazon EC2 instance to your Simple AD
Important Notice
AWS Directory Service Simple AD will no longer be open to new customers starting July 30, 2026. If you would like to use the service, please sign up prior to July 30, 2026. For capabilities similar to Simple AD, explore AWS Managed Microsoft AD or AD Connector. For more information, see Simple AD availability changes.
You can seamlessly join an Amazon EC2 instance to your Active Directory domain when the instance is launched. For more information, see Joining an Amazon EC2 Windows instance to your AWS Managed Microsoft AD Active Directory. You can also launch an EC2 instance and join it to an Active Directory domain directly from the Directory Service console with AWS Systems Manager Automation.
If you need to manually join an EC2 instance to your Active Directory domain, you must launch the instance in the proper Region and security group or subnet, then join the instance to the domain.
To be able to connect remotely to these instances, you must have IP connectivity to the instances from the network you are connecting from. In most cases, this requires that an internet gateway be attached to your VPC and that the instance has a public IP address.
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