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Amazon adds Windows, Linux SLA into cloud service

By Alex Handy

October 24, 2008 — The jungle is listening to developers. Amazon has added two of the most requested features by developers to its Elastic Compute Cloud: Windows instances and a service-level agreement for Linux users.

The new Windows services include IIS, a C# wrapper for Amazon's cloud APIs, and the ability to run SQL Server.

Jeff Barr, senior Web services evangelist at Amazon, said that the company's Web services have now surpassed its other Web holdings in terms of bandwidth usage. “Web services bandwidth has expanded beyond that of all of Amazon's other stuff combined. There are 22 billion objects stored in S3 and over 400,000 registered AWS users,” said Barr. All of these milestones occurred before Amazon's EC2 was even out of beta.

As of yesterday, however, non-Windows EC2 services became generally available, ending the more than two-year-long beta period. In its place, EC2 for Windows is now in beta, and thus exempt from the service level agreements for now. The rest of EC2 can be signed into an SLA that guarantees a 99.95% service uptime.

For Windows users, EC2's API's are now available with a C# wrapper, allowing .NET developers to deal with the numerous other services in Amazon's cloud, such as billing, monitoring and queuing systems.

Now that EC2 is generally available, Barr said that Amazon is concentrating on building in hooks for compliance. HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance within the cloud is difficult to provide, but Barr assured developers that it was an ongoing effort inside Amazon.

Earlier this month, Amazon revised the pricing model for its S3 storage system. That cloud price increased with the addition of Windows to EC2. In general, Amazon is charging around 25% more for Windows, and as much as a 100% more for Windows with Authentication Services (a package that includes Kerberos, LDAP and other credential services). Windows with Authentication Services is required if a developer uses more than five Windows accounts.

Amazon offers a cloud calculator on its AWS site that can help developers figure out how much it will cost to host their application in the cloud.

Chris Keene, chairman and CEO of WaveMaker, said that Amazon's rise in Web services is a surprise development of the emerging cloud market.

“It's kind of amazing. You would have expected Sun to be doing what Amazon was three years ago. In some ways, it's one of the great missed opportunities that it was Amazon, a book company, that did it,” said Keene.

Keene also said that, in his experience, an average application with a fairly common workload hosted in Amazon's cloud tended to cost around US$1,200 per month.

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, Linux, Windows, Amazon, Microsoft

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