I’ve been waiting 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 found a distribution running Windows virtually that got anywhere near the performance I would get out of a beige box.
But with native support for Windows Server 2003 boxes from Amazon, now we’re talking. The cost per hour is a few cents more than the Linux distributions (to cover licensing fees I guess) but definitely doable. And with the new ElasticFox firefox extension, there’s no more mucking around on the command line to create and deploy instances.
Let this screenshot be a hint of the things to come 
UPDATE: I just got the official mailing from Amazon talking about the launch of Windows servers. It also had a cool little look at their 2009 feature roll-out:
- Load balancing – Enables AWS customers to balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
- Auto-scaling – Automatically grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements.
- Cloud monitoring – Enables AWS customers to monitor operational metrics of Amazon EC2, providing visibility into usage of the AWS cloud.
- Management Console – Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets customers manage and access their AWS cloud resources.
Tags: amazon ec2, windows server
Kick ass!