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  5. Amazon EC2 Reaches Out To Windows Developers: Page 2 of 2
Cloud Infrastructure

Amazon EC2 Reaches Out To Windows Developers: Page 2 of 2

Amazon EC2 is upping the ante with Microsoft's competitive cloud platform, Azure, by matching its free offer of up to 750 hours per month, for up to a year, of developer time for Windows Server 2003 R2, 2008 and 2008 R2 editions. As part of its AWS Free Usage Tier, customers can select from a range of pre-configured Amazon Machine Images with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and, once running, connect via Microsoft Remote Desktop Client to build, migrate, test and deploy their Web applications o
January 19, 2012

"The only significance to this is that Amazon has reached a pace such that it can comfortably absorb the cost of running a tiny server and the Windows Server license fee (diminous on a single server anyway) as a loss leader," states analyst Carl Brooks, The 451 Group. "It will obviously encourage Windows-only experimenters, but that's not significant in terms of Amazon's general adoption or increasing usage. It's a kind of technological beneficence to show good will. Means nothing in terms of Azure or anyone else; Amazon stands alone in cloud infrastructure delivery, and everyone else is following behind or carving out their own niche."

Amazon's announcement comes just days after Microsoft enhanced its System Center 2012 Release Candidate for private clouds. It added an application controller which disconnects apps from the OS, an orchestration module which automates application and virtual machine deployment and management tasks. This is considered to be Microsoft's big move into private cloud, which should make it easier for enterprises to get into the game, but the company still needs to focus efforts in enticing server, storage, and networking vendors to integrate with System Center.

Windows Server users who sign up for a trial on EC2 also get 750 hours of free usage time to run Linux, access to Elastic Load Balancer time and bandwidth, Elastic Block storage, S3 storage, and other services. After the free trial, they can purchase access to EC2 at regular rates, which start at 3 cents per hour for a micro instance, and run to $2.97 per hour for instances that stretch across clusters of up to eight machines.

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