Windows Servers Available in EC2
First, let me say I do not work for Amazon. I buy quite a bit from them, but I am not employed by them nor do I own Amazon stock. I blog about them quite a bit, but if they weren’t doing such exciting stuff, I wouldn’t.
Today, if you run one of their on-demand servers (Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2), you’ve been limited to Linux as the operating system. You can choose the distribution of your choice, and even the kernel you run, but it was still Linux. Which, for a lot of people, was just fine.
Today, Amazon announced that starting this fall, you will be able to now run Windows Servers on-demand. This means you can easily setup and provision ASP.net servers, SQL Servers and more. Once your instance is launched, you can use Remote Desktop to administer your server. Here’s a quick snip from the release:
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.
No word yet if the Windows servers will cost more per hour. You can view the release here.
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