(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Two months after launching its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud in Europe, cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (aws.amazon.com) has enabled EC2 users to run Windows or SQL Server instances in the the European region, letting customers locate their Windows computing resources closer to European end-users, as well as to other Amazon computing services such as S3 and CloudFront.
According to Amazon’s Tuesday announcement, Amazon EC2 running Windows Server in the EU Region begins at $0.135 per compute hour on a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud, and has been popular among developers because it scales to their specific computing resource needs.
Amazon EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 is a fast and dependable environment for deploying applications using the Microsoft Web Platform, including ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, and Internet Information Server, according to the company. Amazon EC2 lets customers run any compatible Windows-based application on AWS’ high-performance cloud computing platform, including website and web-service hosting, high-performance computing and data processing. As well, Amazon EC2 now supports the SQL Server Express and SQL Server Standard databases, and makes those offerings available to customers on an hourly basis.
Also announced Tuesday, the AWS Management Console has been extended to the EU Region, making it easier to setup and manage Amazon EC2. European customers will now have many of the same features as their US counterparts, including provisioning and managing Linux/UNIX and Windows instances, Amazon EBS volumes, and elastic IP addresses.
Amazon also announced some added benefits for US EC2 users Tuesday, launching an additional “Availability Zone” for Windows instances in the US Region, making it possible to build Windows-based systems that are resilient to failure in a single location. While the US has east and west regions with multiple availability zones, Europe simply has two Availability Zones that let developers build applications that can tolerate a variety of failure scenarios.
Using Amazon EC2 with Windows Server is similar to using Amazon EC2 with any other operating system. Amazon EC2 running Windows will provide seamless integration with existing Amazon EC2 features like Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Elastic IPs. Windows instances are available in multiple Availability Zones in both the US and EU Regions.
In December, Amazon Web Services launched Amazon EC2 instances in Europe, helping European developers and businesses achieve lower latency, operate closer to other resources and meet data storage regulatory requirements.
Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels expanded on the announcement in a Tuesday blog post. “This allows developers who use our Windows instances to build solutions that can tolerate various failure and recovery scenarios. It also puts Windows Server into the hands of developers who want low latency for their European customers.”
He also notes that the Amazon AWS console now lets users launch instances in any of Amazon’s regions, regardless whether it is Europe or the US, and popular third party tools such as Elastic Fox have been upgraded with advanced naming an tagging capabilities for use with the new enhancements.
“Rolling out services and features globally is very important to us as it allows our customers to take a uniform approach to serving their customers world-wide,” Vogels wrote.
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