Amazon to offer Windows services on EC2

Empty spaces

Interesting post on the Amazon Web Services blog who have announced their intention to host Windows instances in their elastic computing cloud (EC2). Here’s what they say:

You will be able to use Amazon EC2 to host highly scalable ASP.NET sites, high performance computing (HPC) clusters, media transcoders, SQL Server, and more. You can run Visual Studio (or another development environment) on your desktop and run the finished code in the Amazon cloud.

The 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows Server will be available and will be able to use all existing EC2 features such as Elastic IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and the Elastic Block Store. You’ll be able to call any of the other Amazon Web Services from your application. You will, for example, be able to use the Amazon Simple Queue Service to glue cross-platform applications together.

The “cloud” market is certainly getting hotter and hotter. Amazon is making huge inroads into this space and their descision to host services created by Microsoft is testament to the Microsoft arena catching up in this space. The interesting thing about this is that it will increase take-up of cloud services and (this is what I find most exciting) on a “pay-as-you-go” basis. They haven’t announced pricing yet, but the price points of the different elements in the AWS stack is pretty compelling, so I’m sure it will be quite reasonable.

Microsoft is making itself more “cloud-available” through it’s “Dublin” initiative, but I’m not sure what’s covered by NDA around that, so I’ll probably won’t talk more about it before PDC. Anyone going?

5 comments

  1. Thank god for companies like Amazon that are always willing to innovate. The market is truly a wondrous thing!

  2. I love how innovative companies are, that is really what makes them successful. This sounds like a great idea, but something I probably will not use

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.