Windows Server floating onto Amazon's cloud

EC2 takes note of "most requested" feature

By Ina Fried, 2 October 2008 08:23

NEWS

Amazon said on Wednesday that it plans to offer its cloud computing customers the option of running Microsoft's Windows Server operating system as well as its SQL Server database.

Starting sometime this autumn, Amazon said customers of its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service will be able to run Windows, in addition to the Unix-based options currently available. Amazon is currently conducting a private beta test of the new Microsoft-based options.

In a blog posting, Amazon said: "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. 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 company said EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server will be useful for running ASP.NET websites, media transcoding and other Windows-based applications.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is expected to talk more about the ability to write applications directly to its Live Mesh service at its Professional Developers Conference, which takes place at the end of this month.

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