October 03, 2008, 11:02 AM — Maybe it's because they liked the Jerry Seinfeld commercials. For whatever reason, Amazon has gotten the Microsoft religion and will be running Windows Server and SQL Server on its Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). This is big news for Microsoft channel partners and developers, who until now, have been cut out of the loop as far as taking advantage of Amazon's cloud services. EC2 has until now been strictly a Linux and Unix play.
According to Amazon's announcement, there is currently a private beta of EC2 running Windows Server and SQL server, and they plan to launch it to the public later this fall.
Plenty of Microsoft VARs, especially those involved in e-commerce, have long wanted to take advantage of the EC2 service.
