WARNING: This blog entry is super geeky. Proceed only if you know what an “elastic computing cloud” is 
This article is a little older, but I was blown away when I saw it. The Enomaly Open Source Consulting group has been able to get Windows Server 2003 running on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud. I hadn’t heard of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (”EC2″) until the other day, but it’s almost as amazing as their S3 storage offering.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction.
Supporting only *nix operating-systems initially, it was a challenge for EC2 to support Windows Server. However, Enomaly was able to run Windows Server via the processor emulator QEMU. They then packaged the image into an AIM (a EC2 computing image) running the Windows Server 2003 trial. From there, you can put your own Windows license onto the server, Remote Desktop in, and away you go!
Some nights, I’m just blown away by what some developers are able to achieve. Elastic computing clouds, attached to unlimited bandwidth, provides a massively scalable architecture on which to build complex web applications that scale effortlessly. Akamai’s content delivery network is about to look very antiquated 
I don’t think most people understand yet the massive implication of distributed computing clouds. This is what Web 3.0 is going to be about: “Elastic computing clouds, attached to unlimited bandwidth, providing a massively scalable architecture on which to build complex web applications that scale effortlessly.” Exciting stuff.
I wouldn’t run my website on this kind of environment.
[...] for this for so long! You can now run Windows servers on Amazon EC2. I’ve been playing with a few ways of getting Windows Server 2003 to run on EC2, but it’s always been a massive hack. I never [...]