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.

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