AWS re:Invent 2026: 23 Microsoft Workload Sessions for .NET, SQL Server and VMware Migration

Scheduled for November 30 through December 4, 2026, in Las Vegas, this year’s Microsoft-focused programming at re:Invent centers heavily on agentic AI modernization using AWS Transform and Kiro, aggressive strategies for shedding Windows Server and SQL Server licensing overhead, large-scale VMware exit playbooks, and high-availability engineering. Whether you are packing your bags for the Nevada desert or simply benchmarking where cloud modernization tooling is headed, the 23-session lineup offers a revealing look at how AWS is pitching the future of enterprise Microsoft infrastructure.

Before you start locking in calendar blocks, however, it pays to read the fine print with a veteran administrator’s skepticism. What follows is a complete, practitioner-focused breakdown of every session in the track, the architectural trends driving them, and the logistical traps you will want to avoid on the Las Vegas Strip.

The Big Picture: From Lift-and-Shift to Agentic Modernization​

If you look back at previous re:Invent cycles—including the 2024 and 2025 Microsoft workload tracks documented on the Modernizing with AWS blog—the conversation was already tilting toward AI-assisted migration. For 2026, AWS has pushed that thesis into overdrive. Rather than treating cloud migration as a simple "lift-and-shift" exercise where Windows Server virtual machines merely trade an on-premises hypervisor for Amazon EC2, the 2026 curriculum overwhelmingly emphasizes refactoring away from proprietary licensing altogether.

Across the 23 listed sessions, five core themes dominate the agenda:

• Agentic AI for.NET and Database Refactoring: Using AWS Transform and Kiro to port legacy.NET Framework codebases (including Web Forms) to cross-platform.NET 10, and converting T-SQL and stored procedures into Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.
• Escaping Licensing Gravity: Tactical workshops on trimming Windows Server and SQL Server bills on EC2—such as downgrading SQL Server Enterprise to Standard or eliminating passive-node high-availability licensing fees—alongside full migrations to Linux and open-source database engines.
• The Great VMware Exit: Purpose-built tracks for organizations feeling the squeeze of Broadcom-era VMware licensing, contrasting native refactoring waves against lifting VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 environments onto Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS).
• Resiliency and Observability: Proving out Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) under simulated failure conditions using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, Systems Manager, and hybrid monitoring tools.
• Bridging the DBA Skills Gap: Helping traditional SQL Server database administrators translate familiar on-premises habits into AWS networking, security, and availability constructs.

One crucial caveat for enterprise planners: session abstracts at cloud conferences are naturally written to showcase best-case scenarios. When an AWS session description cites a 70% operating cost reduction, a 48% projected savings figure, or a six-month.NET port compressed into 48 hours, treat those numbers as vendor-reported case studies or architectural targets rather than guaranteed baselines for your own environment. Automated transformation agents can accelerate dependency mapping and boilerplate code conversion, but they do not eliminate the need for rigorous regression testing, security auditing, and human verification.

Track 1: Application Modernization and.NET Portability​

For Windows developers and DevOps engineers, the flagship technical hurdle remains moving off Windows-bound.NET Framework versions onto modern, cross-platform.NET so workloads can run on Linux containers without Windows Server licensing costs. AWS’s 2026.NET track leans heavily on AWS Transform (including its Interactive Mode) and Kiro to handle the heavy lifting.

• MAM346 — Your playbook for modernizing 988K lines of.NET in 2 days (Level 300 Lightning Talk)
  • When & Where: Monday, Nov 30, 10:30 AM – 10:50 AM PST | Wynn/Encore
  • The Breakdown: According to AWS’s session summary, payments provider TNS migrated its Altitude platform—spanning 274 projects and 988,000 lines of code—from.NET Framework to.NET 10 in two days rather than an estimated six months, while remediating 34 security vulnerabilities along the way. Because this is a 20-minute lightning talk, attendees should listen closely for what preparatory work preceded that two-day window and how testing was validated afterward.
• MAM417 — Modernize your full.NET and SQL Server stack with AWS Transform (Level 400 Workshop)
  • When & Where: Wednesday, Dec 2, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST | Caesars Palace
  • The Breakdown: A two-hour, deep-dive hands-on workshop pairing.NET Framework-to-cross-platform.NET porting with a simultaneous database migration from SQL Server to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, culminating in deployment to Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS. AWS claims this architectural shift can lower operating costs by up to 70%, though specific baseline assumptions are not detailed in the guide. Prerequisite: You must bring your own laptop and an active GitHub account.
• MAM411 — Best Practices for.NET modernization with AWS Transform (Level 400 Builders’ Session)
  • When & Where: Thursday, Dec 3, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST | Caesars Palace
  • The Breakdown: Rather than treating AI transformation as a black box, this builders’ session focuses on controlling the AWS Transform agent using custom plans, steering documents, iterative checkpoints, and human review. Prerequisite: Bring a laptop and your own modernization use cases.
• MAM416 — Free your.NET app from Windows licensing with AI-powered portability (Level 400 Workshop)
  • When & Where: Thursday, Dec 3, 3:30 PM – 5:30 PM PST | Caesars Palace
  • The Breakdown: Anyone who has ever tried to untangle legacy ASP.NET Web Forms knows that UI and state management rarely port cleanly. This workshop walks through converting a.NET Framework 4.8 Web Forms application to.NET 10 Blazor using AWS Transform Interactive Mode, utilizing Kiro to iron out post-transformation runtime bugs, and deploying the result to Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate.

Section Takeaway: If your organization is still maintaining.NET Framework 4.8 Web Forms or sprawling enterprise class libraries, pairing MAM411 (steering the agent) with MAM416 (handling Web Forms and runtime fixes) on Thursday afternoon at Caesars Palace makes for a practical back-to-back technical block.

Track 2: Infrastructure, VMware Exits, and Database Migration​

The largest portion of the Microsoft workloads guide—13 sessions in total—tackles the gritty reality of getting servers and databases out of on-premises data centers and refactoring monolithic SQL Server instances.

Assessment and Migration Readiness​

• MAM210 — On-premises to AWS readiness: foundational decisions before your migration (Level 200 Chalk Talk)
  • When & Where: Monday, Nov 30, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PST (Caesars Palace) | Repeat: Tuesday, Dec 1, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM PST (Caesars Palace)
  • The Breakdown: Covers pre-migration architecture, licensing, operating models, and organizational readiness for teams moving off VMware or traditional hardware.
• MAM306 — Build a data-driven migration plan with AWS Transform (Level 300 Builders’ Session)
  • When & Where: Monday, Nov 30, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PST (Caesars Palace) | Repeat: Thursday, Dec 3, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM PST (Caesars Palace)
  • The Breakdown: Focuses on feeding Discovery Agent telemetry into AWS Transform to evaluate environments, calculate cost estimates, and assemble a boardroom-ready data center exit proposal.
• MAM211 — How to assess your environment to migrate & modernize with confidence (Level 200 Chalk Talk)
  • When & Where: Monday, Nov 30, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM PST (Caesars Palace) | Repeat: Tuesday, Dec 1, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM PST (Caesars Palace)
  • The Breakdown: Explores using AWS Transform’s agentic assessment capabilities—or engaging AWS specialists and partners—to inventory workloads and strip out redundant licensing before migration.
• MAM208 — Building migration readiness when the timeline is tight (Level 200 Breakout Session)
  • When & Where: Tuesday, Dec 1, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM PST | Caesars Palace
  • The Breakdown: Examines compressed migration timelines driven by sudden compliance mandates or licensing renewals. The session features financial giant Vanguard, which AWS states migrated hundreds of applications under deadline pressure with zero critical outages.
• MAM320 — Fanatics path to AWS: 5 data centers, 1,800 servers, 48% savings (Level 300 Breakout Session)
  • When & Where: Wednesday, Dec 2, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM PST | Caesars Palace
  • The Breakdown: Details how Fanatics Commerce mapped its exit from five data centers and 1,800 servers with a projected 48% cost savings. Notably, the session breaks down AWS’s alphabet soup of planning programs in sequence: Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA), Data-Driven Everything / dependency assessment (DAP), Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA) for alignment, and the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for execution. Keep in mind the 48% savings figure is explicitly described as projected.

Database Decomposition and SQL Server-to-PostgreSQL Conversion​

• MAM403 — Decompose a monolith database into microservices with agentic AI (Level 400 Chalk Talk)
  • When & Where: Monday, Nov 30, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM PST (Caesars Palace) | Repeat: Tuesday, Dec 1, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM PST (Wynn/Encore)
  • The Breakdown: Presents a two-layer method analyzing both static database structure and live runtime patterns to identify microservice boundaries and pull business logic out of stored procedures using AWS Transform and Kiro—a process AWS claims can compress months of analysis into hours.
• MAM317 — How to decompose Oracle and SQL Server into purpose-built databases (Level 300 Chalk Talk)
  • When & Where: Monday, Nov 30, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM PST (Caesars Palace) | Repeat: Tuesday, Dec 1, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST (MGM Grand)
  • The Breakdown: A whiteboarding session on splitting monolithic relational databases into three specialized tiers: Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL for transactional processing, Aurora pgvector for generative AI vector search, and Amazon Redshift via zero-ETL for analytics.
• MAM305 — Migrate SQL Server to Aurora PostgreSQL with AI-powered conversion (Level 300 Workshop)
  • When & Where: Monday, Nov 30, 12:30 PM – 2:30 PM PST (Caesars Palace) | Repeat: Tuesday, Dec 1, 12:30 PM – 2:30 PM PST (MGM Grand)
  • The Breakdown: Hands-on practice using AWS Transform to evaluate a SQL Server database, automate schema conversion to Aurora PostgreSQL, resolve dependencies, and deploy converted objects from an IDE.
• MAM337 — Watch AWS Transform convert SQL Server to Aurora PostgreSQL live (Level 300 Code Talk)
  • When & Where: Monday, Nov 30, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST | Caesars Palace
  • The Breakdown: A live demonstration covering schema conversion, T-SQL to PL/pgSQL translation, Entity Framework provider updates in.NET, and wave-based orchestration with human-in-the-loop checkpoints.
• MAM314 — Your playbook: turn your scattered databases into AI-ready infrastructure (Level 300 Lightning Talk)
  • When & Where: Tuesday, Dec 1, 12:00 PM – 12:20 PM PST | Wynn/Encore
  • The Breakdown: A rapid 20-minute overview of migrating SQL Server, Oracle, and databases hosted on VMware or Nutanix to AWS using AWS Transform.
• MAM406 — Modernize Windows to Linux and SQL to PostgreSQL with agentic AI (Level 400 Workshop)
  • When & Where: Thursday, Dec 3, 12:30 PM – 2:30 PM PST | Caesars Palace
  • The Breakdown: Walks through migrating on-premises Windows Server workloads to EC2 via agent installation, replication, and cutover, followed by upgrading SQL Server to PostgreSQL and shifting PHP workloads to Amazon EKS. Prerequisite: Laptop required.

VMware Exit and Elastic VMware Service Strategies​

• MAM330 — Architect and optimize your VMware environment on Amazon EVS (Level 300 Chalk Talk)
  • When & Where: Monday, Nov 30, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM PST | Caesars Palace
  • The Breakdown: Designed for teams keeping the VMware hypervisor stack while moving to the cloud. Covers Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) architecture, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 support, Windows Server license-included entitlements, networking, storage, backup, and disaster recovery.
• MAM415 — Large-scale VMware exit: engineering a 10,000+ server migration wave engine (Level 400 Chalk Talk)
  • When & Where: Monday, Nov 30, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM PST | Caesars Palace
  • The Breakdown: Designed for organizations leaving VMware altogether. Focuses on using AWS Transform for TCO assessment, wave planning, cutover, and modernization across 10,000+ server estates, with AWS claiming 18-month migration timelines can be shortened to ten months or less.

Section Takeaway: Notice that MAM330 (staying on VMware via Amazon EVS) and MAM415 (exiting VMware across 10,000+ servers) run at the exact same time—Monday at 2:30 PM at Caesars Palace—with no listed repeats. If your architecture team is debating whether to rehost on EVS or refactor off VMware, send two people and compare notes afterward.

Track 3: Licensing Optimization, Resiliency, and DBA Essentials​

Not every enterprise is ready—or able—to rewrite its applications for Linux and PostgreSQL tomorrow. If third-party vendor support matrices or internal risk tolerances keep you anchored to Windows Server and SQL Server, the remaining tracks focus on running those Microsoft workloads efficiently and resiliently on AWS.

Licensing and Cost Optimization​

• MAM405 — Four labs to shrink your Windows and SQL Server licensing bill (Level 400 Builders’ Session)
  • When & Where: Thursday, Dec 3, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM PST | Caesars Palace
  • The Breakdown: Worth setting an early alarm for after Wednesday night’s networking receptions. This session puts attendees through four concrete cost-reduction exercises on Amazon EC2: right-sizing instances with AWS Compute Optimizer, tuning vCPU counts via Optimize CPU (to reduce per-core SQL Server licensing exposure without starving memory or I/O), eliminating licensing fees on passive SQL Server high-availability nodes, and downgrading SQL Server Enterprise Edition to Standard Edition where Enterprise features aren’t actually used. Practitioner note: Always verify your specific Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, Software Assurance, and License Mobility terms before executing edition downgrades or passive failover changes in production.
• MAM209 — Strategies for optimizing enterprise licenses on AWS (Level 200 Breakout Session)
  • When & Where: Thursday, Dec 3, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST | Caesars Palace
  • The Breakdown: A broader strategic overview of managing Microsoft and other enterprise software licenses across EC2 and Amazon RDS, highlighting how a customer turned a one-time AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA) into a continuous FinOps governance practice.

Resiliency, Operations, and DBA Fundamentals​

• MAM329 — Observability patterns for Microsoft workloads migrating to AWS (Level 300 Chalk Talk)
  • When & Where: Monday, Nov 30, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM PST (Caesars Palace) | Repeat: Tuesday, Dec 1, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM PST (MGM Grand)
  • The Breakdown: Addresses monitoring blind spots when hybrid.NET apps, Windows services, and SQL Server databases span VMs, containers, and serverless compute, combining AWS-native telemetry with open-source observability tooling.
• MAM401 — Build and test HA/DR architectures for Microsoft workloads on AWS (Level 400 Builders’ Session)
  • When & Where: Wednesday, Dec 2, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PST | Caesars Palace
  • The Breakdown: A hands-on chaos and recovery lab where attendees build high-availability and disaster-recovery topologies for Windows Server and SQL Server, inject simulated failures, and measure live RTO and RPO using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery and AWS Systems Manager. The session also touches on Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and AWS Managed Microsoft AD.
• MAM311 — AWS fundamentals for the accidental SQL Server database administrator (Level 300 Chalk Talk)
  • When & Where: Monday, Nov 30, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM PST (Caesars Palace) | Repeat: Tuesday, Dec 1, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM PST (Caesars Palace)
  • The Breakdown: Translates everyday on-premises SQL Server DBA duties into AWS concepts across VPC networking, IAM and security, high availability, and disaster recovery, while introducing Kiro and AWS Transform as operational ramp-up tools.

Master Schedule Reference & Logistics Table​

To help you spot scheduling collisions at a glance, here is the complete 23-session matrix organized by track, code, level, format, and venue:

Practical Survival Tips for Attendees​

If you have never navigated AWS re:Invent in person, the conference footprint across the Las Vegas Strip can humble even the most organized project manager. According to the official AWS re:Invent 2026 agenda page, event activities span Caesars Forum, Caesars Palace, MGM Grand, The Venetian, and Wynn/Encore, with AWS explicitly advising attendees to budget extra travel time when moving between properties.

Keep these four logistical realities in mind when building your schedule:

1. Make Caesars Palace Your Home Base: Nearly every primary session in the Microsoft workloads guide takes place at Caesars Palace. The exceptions are two lightning talks (MAM346 and MAM314) and the Tuesday repeat of MAM403 at Wynn/Encore, plus the Tuesday repeats of MAM305, MAM317, and MAM329 at MGM Grand. Do not book a 10:30 AM session at Wynn/Encore (MAM346) and expect to teleport to Caesars Palace for an 11:30 AM chalk talk (MAM403) without a brisk trek or favorable shuttle timing.
2. Use Tuesday Repeats to Unclog Monday Morning: Monday, November 30 at Caesars Palace has a massive traffic jam: MAM306 (10:00–11:00 AM), MAM211 (10:30–11:30 AM), and MAM311 (10:30–11:30 AM) all overlap, as do MAM305 (12:30–2:30 PM) and MAM337 (1:00–2:00 PM). Because MAM337 (the live SQL-to-Aurora code talk) has no listed repeat, prioritize MAM337 on Monday and catch the MAM305 two-hour workshop during its Tuesday repeat at MGM Grand.
3. Watch the Time-Zone Label: While the Modernizing with AWS blog post labels all session times in PST (Pacific Standard Time, which is standard for Nevada in late November and December), the main AWS re:Invent 2026 agenda overview page includes a header note stating that times are listed in Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) and are subject to change. Rely on the live AWS Events mobile app and the official Session Catalog portal once on site so calendar imports don't shift your schedule by an hour.
4. Pack Your Gear and Check Prerequisites: Chalk talks, builders’ sessions, and workshops have limited seating and rarely get recorded for public replay (unlike standard breakout sessions and keynotes, some of which later surface in curated post-conference summaries like AWS Best of re:Invent). Furthermore, MAM417 requires both a laptop and a GitHub account, while MAM411 and MAM406 explicitly require a laptop. Check the re:Invent Portal before arriving to verify whether any local IDE plugins or sandbox setup steps are recommended ahead of time.

Whether your 2027 roadmap calls for squeezing every last dollar of efficiency out of Windows Server on EC2 or finally cutting the cord on legacy.NET Framework and SQL Server licensing, this year’s re:Invent lineup leaves no doubt where cloud providers see the enterprise market moving. Have you tested agentic AI refactoring tools like AWS Transform or Kiro against a real production.NET or SQL Server codebase yet, or are you sticking with battle-tested Windows Server infrastructure? Share your migration war stories with the WindowsForum.com community.