Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, writes in his blog post Expanding the Cloud: Microsoft Windows Server on Amazon EC2 that

With today's announcement that Microsoft Windows Server is available on Amazon EC2 we can now run the majority of popular software systems in the cloud. Windows Server ranked very high on the list of requests by customers so we are happy that we will be able to provide this.

One particular area that customers have been asking for Amazon EC2 with Windows Server was for Windows Media transcoding and streaming. There is a range of excellent codecs available for Windows Media and there is a large amount of legacy content in those formats. In past weeks I met with a number of folks from the entertainment industry and often their first question was: when can we run on windows?

There are many different reasons why customers have requested Windows Server; for example many customers want to run ASP.NET websites using Internet Information Server and use Microsoft SQL Server as their database. Amazon EC2 running Windows Server enables this scenario for building scalable websites. In addition, several customers would like to maintain a global single Windows-based desktop environment using Microsoft Remote Desktop, and Amazon EC2 is a scalable and dependable platform on which to do so.

This is great news. I'm starting a month long vacation as a precursor to my paternity leave since the baby is due next week and was looking to do some long overdue hacking in-between burping the baby and changing diapers. My choices were

• Facebook platform app
• Google App Engine app
• EC2/S3/EBS app

The problem with Amazon was the need to use Linux which I haven't seriously messed with since my college days running SuSe. If I could use Windows Server and ASP.NET while still learning the nuances of EC2/S3/EBS that would be quite sweet.

I wonder how who I need to holler at to get in the Windows Server on EC2 beta? Maybe Derek can hook me up. Hmmmmm.

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