Amazon Web Services (AWS) is reaching farther into the cloud. After two years in beta, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is now generally available. Amazon also announced a beta for hosted support running Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server.
The company’s service level agreement for EC2 provides resizable cloud capacity for businesses and developers. The SLA guarantees 99.95 percent availability, and Amazon said it’s designed to spur confidence that even the most demanding applications will run dependably.
Enlarging EC2
Peter De Santis, general manager of EC2, said accessing computing power over the Web was a novel idea when the company launched the beta two years ago. Today, more businesses are turning to cloud computing for cost savings without sacrificing speed, reliability, flexibility and performance. Amazon cited Eli Lilly and Company as an example.
“Amazon EC2 has given us the ability to easily spin up tailored computing environments that can quickly and cost-effectively process tremendous amounts of research data,” said Dave Powers, associate information consultant at Eli Lilly. “This is a huge step forward in maximizing our results relative to IT spend, and now that Amazon EC2 runs Windows and SQL Server, we have even greater flexibility in the kinds of applications we can build in the AWS cloud.”
As Powers mentioned, the next step for Amazon is EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server. Amazon said Windows on EC2 has been a common request of AWS customers since the service launched. EC2 now offers an environment for deploying ASP.NET Web sites, high-performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications.
Amazon offers the same pay-as-you-go model with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees as it did with its original service. Pricing for using Windows Server with EC2 begins at $0.125 per computing hour.
Microsoft’s Cloudy Decisions
The Microsoft EC2 deal offers the…