General, Research - Friday, October 24, 2008 18:30 - 0 Comments

Amazon goes live with Windows in the Cloud

Yes finally!! :) If you aren’t a fun of cloud completing you should be. It is extremely cost effective, reliable and easy to use. I’ve been dying to get really hands on with Amazon’s EC2 but since launch it has only supported Linux images.

Today they have turned on support for Windows! including SQL Server and the licenses are bundled in the image. You can also store information directly in their S3 service.

I’ll be posting results here from testing and pricing as I spend the next month getting some applications deployed in their cloud.

It was interesting to see that Rackspace is going to try compete - albeit too late to the party but we’ll see what they come up with. I can’t blame them - cloud competing is a huge threat to traditional hosting companies however it took Amazon a long time to get EC2 ready so it isn’t something you just dive into.