Amazon Launches EC2 for Windows

• By theWHIR.com , October 23, 2008

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By David Hamilton, theWHIR.com

October 23, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Having officially exited its beta period, Amazon's (www.aws.amazon.com) Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2), has entered development again, releaseing the first public beta of EC2 running Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server.

According to Amazon's Thursday announcement, originally launched in beta in August of 2006, EC2 is now a fully developed product, offering customers a service level agreement. Also, Amazon now offers customers Windows Server and SQL Server with all of the performance, reliability and scalability benefits of the traditionally Linux-based Amazon EC2, making it an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites and other Windows-based applications.

"When we launched Amazon EC2 over two years ago, the idea of accessing computing power over the web was still a novel idea," Amazon EC2 general manager Peter De Santis said in a statement. "We've listened closely to our customers for the past two years and worked backward from their requirements, adding important new features such as those we are announcing today - Windows support and a service level agreement."

The pricing for Windows-based EC2 is based on a pay-as-you-go model starting at $0.125 per hour of computing with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees.

Amazon has also released plans for new EC2 features to come in 2009 including: load balancing across multiple EC2 compute instances; auto-scaling of compute capacity usage based on application requirements; monitoring features that provide operational metrics and better visibility into usage of the Amazon cloud; and a management console to provide a simple, point-and-click Web interface for managing and accessing cloud resources.

"I think it is important to note that load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring will each be true web services, with complete APIs for provisioning, control, and status checking," wrote developer evangelist Jeff Barr on the Amazon Web Services blog. "We'll be working with a number of management tool vendors and developers to make sure that their products will support these new services on a timely basis."

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