Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Amazon Extends EC2 Windows Support Into Europe

Seattle-based Amazon Web Services LLC, the web services subsidiary of Amazon.com, announced this morning that it has extended support for Microsoft Windows and Microsoft SQL Server into Europe. The firm said the Amazon EC2 Windows support--which was launched in October for users in the US--will be available to its EU Region customers today, including access to the new features in the AWS Management Console, Amazon's interface for managing EC2 instances. Amazon has been rolling out its cloud computing services to Europe after ironing out the services in the US: the firm only rolled out local, EC2 support in Europe in December. Amazon's EC2 services running Windows includes support for ASP.NET, AJAX, Silverlight, and Internet Information Server (IIS), along with SQL Server Express and SQL Server Standard. EC2 is Amazon's cloud computing service, which allows customers to create virtual server images in either Linux or Windows via an API; those servers can be used to scale out web applications or create cloud computing farms, billed by how much CPU and traffic is send to those servers.