This is going to be a little bit out of order with my other posts about Amazon AWS, but it’s worth doing it. Amazon has launched finally the ability to run Windows images in EC2. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 actually, from 0.125$ per hour, compared to the 0.10$ for the unix/linux instances.

The instances are accessible through Windows Remote Desktop or the open source multiplatform rdesktop client. The first time you launch an image the password is generated, but you can change it for new images you make based on that one.

A nice feature that will save a lot of time is the ability of creating new Windows AMIs from the ElasticFox interface with a couple of clicks, without needing to mess with software installation in the image (more on image creation in next posts) which is way easier than the process for linux images.

You can also run Windows Server with SQL Server Standard, but watch out for the 1.10$ per hour, which makes 792$ per month that you can compare to the 6000$ processor license fee.

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