UnitySync now supports AWS Directory Service (and Samba!)

During our evaluation of Amazon’s latest soon to be email service, WorkMail, we had a great discussion with their email team and found out that Amazon also has a directory service called: Amazon Simple AD.

Their claim was that it was Active Directory in the cloud. After a bit of research we found they were running Samba, an open source Active Directory server. We ran some initial tests with UnitySync and found it to act exactly like an AD DC with full LDAP support.

After a few tests we are happy to report that ALL versions of UnitySync will support Simple AD. Just use the stock Active Directory (No Exchange Extensions) templates!

There are 2 caveats:

*No apparent LDAP SSL/TLS Support (not a bad thing see next)
*The directory instances don't have an internet facing public address.  We solved this in testing by installing UnitSync into an EC2 instance and communicating over the local net.  

We are very encouraged by Amazon directory as a service solution for it’s ease of it’s configuration and support of the LDAP standard. Our hope is that other cloud vendors follow suit and natively support LDAP instead of reinventing the wheel with custom closed APIs.