Amazon EC2 News

Today Amazon announced the general availability of EC2 - the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (I think that means it is out of beta). This means it now comes with a Service Level Agreement - which one would think will dramatically increase adoption rates by medium-large sized companies. The SLA provides a 99.95% availability commitment.

Amazon Web Services also announce the availability of the beta for EC2 running Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server.

Amazon EC2 will provide an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. Like all services offered by AWS, Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server offers a low-cost, pay-as-you-go model with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees. Pricing for Amazon EC2 running Windows Server begins at $0.125 per compute hour.

They also provided insights into future plans for 2009 to help companies using their services plan for future roll outs. These enhancements include:

• 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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