For years, organizations have worked to rein in cloud costs through rightsizing, power management, and more efficient pricing models. But for many enterprises, the benefits of these efforts are beginning to taper off. To make their cloud environments even more cost-effective, these organizations must take a new approach.

For enterprises running large Microsoft workloads on AWS, the next big opportunity for cost savings may require leaders to look beyond resource consumption and instead examine the underlying technology stack itself. Specifically, moving appropriate workloads from Microsoft-licensed technologies to open-source and cloud-native alternatives can eliminate some of the most substantial costs that remain even after organizations optimize their underlying cloud infrastructure.

According to the Flexera 2026 State of the Cloud Report, 85% of organizations cite managing cloud costs as a challenge, while 78% say the same about managing software licenses. Even after years of cloud optimization efforts, organizations estimate that 29% of their IaaS and PaaS spending is wasted.

By embracing a modernization strategy that reduces reliance on paid licensing, organizations can cut down on cloud waste that even the most aggressive rightsizing efforts often leave untouched.

Three Ways to Cut Costs

These three action items give many organizations a chance to cut Windows Server and SQL Server licensing costs.

Modernize .NET Applications: Moving legacy .NET Framework applications to modern, cross-platform .NET on Linux takes the “Microsoft tax” out of the cloud cost equation, letting organizations run the same applications while cutting expenses by as much as 50%. Instead of simply moving a Windows application to a smaller or less expensive instance, organizations can run suitable applications on Linux and eliminate Windows licensing costs altogether.

Move SQL Server Databases to PostgreSQL: Organizations can take a similar approach to the database layer of their cloud stack by moving appropriate workloads from Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL or Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. Historically, organizations have often had to rewrite large amounts of application code to start such a migration. However, Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL now lets organizations migrate their database and application with no or minimal schema changes.

Move Away from Traditional VMs: Finally, modernization creates an opportunity to reconsider how organizations deploy and operate applications. Rather than simply moving an application from one virtual machine to another, organizations can break applications into independently deployable components and run them using Linux containers, serverless architectures, or other cloud-native approaches.

These three cost-cutting approaches are interconnected. For example, modernizing a legacy .NET application can enable moving that workload to Linux, which in turn can support Linux containers. An organization might also move the application’s database from SQL Server to PostgreSQL.

AI tools are significantly cutting the upfront costs of this work, allowing enterprises to accelerate their migrations. Tasks such as analyzing legacy codebases, identifying dependencies, refactoring code, and testing can increasingly be automated, changing the ROI calculation for projects that might previously have been considered too expensive to pursue.

Modernization in Action

Hirevue, a U.S.-based HR technology company, worked with Evolve Cloud Services to modernize more than 60 services and 20 databases. Evolve delivered AWS-funded Modernization Viability Assessments (MVAs) that assessed the environment’s infrastructure, codebase, and database schema. Evolve defined a target architecture, database platform, and tech stack based on Linux containers in EKS and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with Babelfish.

The engagement not only helped the company complete its FedRAMP certification for AWS GovCloud but also allowed the company to independently deploy and scale individual services and make more efficient use of its cloud resources. Moving off EC2 Windows alone reduced costs by 30% to 40%, and moving to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL is projected to cut database costs by about 50%.

Taking the Next Step

On November 4 at 1 p.m. Eastern, Evolve Cloud Services will join the Techstrong Group for a webinar discussion about the economics of moving Microsoft workloads toward open-source and license-free infrastructure, databases, and container-based architectures on AWS.

Together, we’ll discuss how organizations can establish a baseline for their current infrastructure and licensing costs, identify modernization opportunities, evaluate the tradeoffs of different target architectures, and build a defensible TCO and ROI use case for modernization. The session will also explore how assessment and modernization automation tools like AWS Transform can help organizations prioritize the workloads with the greatest financial and technical benefits.

Key takeaways will include:

• How infrastructure modernization can reduce both cloud infrastructure and Microsoft licensing costs by moving appropriate workloads from Windows and SQL Server to Linux, PostgreSQL, and cloud-native AWS services.
• How organizations can identify and prioritize the workloads with the strongest business case for modernization, based on cost savings, technical feasibility, licensing exposure, and expected ROI.
• How modernization options such as containers, Aurora PostgreSQL, and Linux can change the long-term economics of running Microsoft workloads on AWS.
• How organizations can build a practical, data-driven roadmap that balances modernization benefits with effort, risk, and business priorities.

Register here to join us.