March 03, 2009, 4:46 PM — Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) now supports Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server in its European region, Amazon announced Tuesday.
EC2 is among a number of cloud infrastructure platforms that enable users to deploy applications that can scale up in response to demand, with costs paid according to usage.
The new EC2 capabilities are available in two "availability zones" in Europe, reducing latency for Windows applications built by developers there, and also enabling them to add fault-tolerance by employing both zones. To that end, Amazon has added a second availability zone for Windows in the U.S., Amazon said.
In addition, Amazon's management console for EC2 now has support in Europe.
"Rolling out services and features globally is very important to us as it allows our customers to take a uniform approach to serving their customers worldwide," Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said in a blog post Tuesday.
About 490,000 developers are now registered with EC2 and the accompanying Simple Storage Service (S3) contains some 40 billion objects, according to Amazon.
