Competition: AWS doesn't sleep

[boss]

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I got an email this morning announcing: Now Available: Amazon EC2 Running Windows Server

This seems like some real competition to Azure, as Amazon EC2 is ready to go. In fact they also announced that they are moving into General Availability from a 2 year Beta program.

So basically, now AWS EC2 hosts Windows Server, SQL server and can run high availability ASP.NET sites, media transcoding solutions, and other Windows based applications.

How do you see this, who will prevail, Windows Azure or AWS Windows platform? What do you think are the advantages going with a genuine Microsoft product?

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Windows Azure
PHP St. Louis
st louis web development

[shan_mcarthur]

Amazon's Windows hosting is like renting iron, and old iron at that. Their Windows hosting model does not follow a cloud hosting model. What I can't figure out is why they used Windows 2003 Server instead of Windows 2008 Server. Same for SQL. I don't see Amazon's Windows hosting model as competing directly against Azure, but it will compete against other hosting companies.