Amazon has announced that they are adding support for Windows and MS SQL Server to their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
We have been waiting for Amazon to announce something like this for quite some time now. It was bound to happen sooner or later. The feature is currently in closed beta, but Amazon promises that you will be able to use Windows Server instances in EC2 before the end of 2008.
From the statement on the AWS website:
Our goal is to support any and all of the programming models, operating systems and database servers that you need for building applications on our cloud computing platform. The ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability. We are currently operating a private beta of Amazon EC2 running Windows Server and SQL Server.
This is obviously good news for all Windows and ASP.NET developers out there.
What price level this will end up on remains to be seen, but Amazon did state that the price for Windows-based instances will be higher than for Linux-based instances due to licensing costs.
