Amazon EC2 Drops Beta Tag, Supports Windows Applications

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The EC2 is a Web service that provides computing capacity through the cloud. Users of EC2 have complete control of their computing resources while running on Amazon's computing environment. According to the Amazon Web services site, "EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use."

That Amazon is allowing customers to use Windows Server and SQL Server through their service is interesting because Microsoft is expected to announce its cloud computing strategy at next week's Professional Developers Conference.

For now, users looking to access Windows Server or SQL Server will be charged $0.125 per computing hour. For that price, customers can use the EC2 cloud power to develop ASP.NET Website, computing clusters, media transcoding clusters or other applications that function in Windows.

That means the service just got a whole lot more attractive. And with Microsoft expected to announce its cloud computing play soon, Amazon's EC2 may have gotten even more relevant.