Amazon Offers Windows, SQL Server Cloud Computing Option

Starting later this fall Amazon.com will begin letting customers run their Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server database software using its Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) cloud computing service, Amazon said in a posting on its Web site.

The news comes one week after Oracle announced that customers would be able to run a number of its software products on Amazon EC2.

Amazon, which already supports a variety of Unix operating systems, said EC2 customers would be able to configure their instances to run the Windows operating system and use SQL Server as a relational database option. The company said Windows and SQL Server would provide "an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET Web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications."

Amazon is currently operating a private beta of EC2 running the Microsoft software.

While Microsoft has dropped hints about providing SQL Server database hosted services itselfnothing concrete has emerged.

Last week, at the Oracle OpenWorld conference, Oracle said its customers could license the Oracle 11g database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Enterprise Linux to run in the Amazon EC2 environment. Customers could also use their existing licenses for those products on Amazon EC2 without additional fees, the company said. Oracle also announced a cloud computing-based data backup solution called Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module that will utilize the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as a backup destination.