Amazon announced cloud hosting for Windows goes public beta today.
The pricing doesn't seem that cheap over colocation of your own server. Is this a revolutionary step towards the obvious future of hosting?
Does anyone have any first hand experience using .net on an amazon virtual box?
Cheapest pricing btw is 12.5 cents per hour.
Seems expensive at $180 per full month for just a small SQL Express + IIS box + Authentication. I think the issue is you get billed full rate on partial hours. If they did away with that and let you be billed on per cpu hour consumed or similar then it might be better.
There are cheaper solutions out there such as Mosso or GoGrid which are cheaper and offer similar products.
However possibly if you already have tight integration with AWS then it would be a goer.
Our company has had poor [Linux] production experience with both Mosso and GoGrid.
We plan to give EC2 with Windows a go sometime in the next few months.
I think one thing to keep in mind is that the purpose of a grid solution is to allow you to spin up additional instances as demand and traffic grows. While you could get away with using a grid solution for regular hosting and gain the benefits of reliability (though so far my experience with grid has been anything but) its probably best to look at it from an on-demand perspective.
If EC2/Windows can deliver what Amazon promises it will save my company thousands of dollars monthly in hosting costs.
This seems very expensive. To be honest I am quite disappointed for several reasons. Firstly they only support Windows 2003 Server. Windows 2008 has been out for long enough that surely they could support that by now. Secondly, they don't mention what version of SQL Server they are supporting but I am guessing it is 2005 as well.
For a Windows 2003 box with SQL Server Standard installed it will cost $1.10 an hour or about $750 month!!
I wonder if it is possible to install your own version of SQL 2008.
It is possible to install your own version of SQL, given you have a license for it. Amazon certainly can't stop you from installing whatever software you wish - the built-in SQL server offerings just allow you to use an hourly licensing model for SQL server, which you can't otherwise do directly from Microsoft.
Remember that you don't actually need to run the Authenticated AMIs unless you're running a system that requires communication of authentication info over the network - like a kerberos (AD) setup. Local accounts work fine with the 'anonymous' versions (up to 5 IIRC). So in a nutshell, the authenticated versions would be more useful if you're running a windows corporate intranet on EC2, but the anonymous are fine for almost any typical use of EC2 or any compute cloud.