Amazon hits Microsoft in the clouds

Microsoft is gearing up to go big with its plans for its own version of its hosted development platform later this month. But Amazon.com isn’t sitting idly by, waiting for Microsoft to rain on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

On October 1, Amazon announced that it plans to offer developers this fall the ability to run Windows Server or SQL Server via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). According to the Amazon Web Services site, “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.”

Update: More on Amazon’s Windows-hosting plans can be found on Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels’ blog.

Further details from the Amazon Web Services site:

“Starting later this Fall, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server. Today, you can choose from a variety of Unix-based operating systems, and soon you will be able to configure your instances to run the Windows Server operating system. In addition, you will be able to use SQL Server as another option within Amazon EC2 for running relational databases.”

Amazon currently is conducting a private beta for testers of hosted Windows Server and SQL Server, according to its site. Amazon is requesting developers interested in using the service fill out a form on the site. The form asks what kinds of applications and services developers plan to build in an Amazon-hosted Windows environment.

Amazon is positioning its hosted Microsoft offerings as “an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based aplications.” Amazon is touting the new Microsoft offerings as part of its plan 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.”

Microsoft, for its part, has been rumored to be building a hosted development platform for more than a year. The company is slated to announce the platform officially at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles in late October when Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business, is slated to unveil Microsoft’s “cloud computing platform” during his keynote on October 27.

source: blogs.zdnet.com

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