Amazon delivers Windows-powered cloud

Amazon has finally launched a Windows beta of its Elastic Compute Cloud service. The move to launch Windows in its cloud comes barely a week ahead of Microsoft's Professional Developers' Conference in Los Angeles.

At this moment, Amazon is offering the option of running either 32- or 64-bit versions of Windows, with data stored in the 64-bit edition of Microsoft's SQL Server database. Pricing will start at $0.125 per hour. There don't seem to be many details regarding the service level agreement at this moment, beyond promising a 99.95 percent uptime or a 10 percent "service credit." Hopefully, Amazon's cloud will not suffer another embarrassing round of closely-spaced outages. One can't help but wonder if there is any relation to the "Windows Cloud" operating system mentioned by Steve Ballmer himself earlier this month.

To read more about Amazon's Windows-powered cloud:
- check out this article at The Register

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