Yesterday Amazon Web Services announced availability of Windows and SQL Server under Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in the European region. Running in the EU is important for workloads that need to be near customers in that region or workloads that operate on data that needs to stay in region. The AWS Management Console has been extended to support EC2 in the EU region. The management council supports administration of Linux, Unix, and Windows systems under Elastic Compute Cloud as well as management of Elastic Block Store and Elastic IP. More details up at: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/03/03/amazon-ec2-running-windows-in-eu-region/.
Also yesterday, Microsoft confirmed Windows Azure Cloud Software Set for Release This Year. The InformationWeek article reports that that Azure will be released by the end of the year and that SQL Server Data Services will include some relational database capabilities. Details are expected at MIX in Vegas this March.
The utility computing world continues to evolve incredibly quickly.
--jrh
James Hamilton, Amazon Web Services
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