Windows Server 2012 Supported by AWS

It was announced earlier this week that Amazon Web Services (AWS) would provide support to Microsoft Windows Server 2012, enabling customers of Windows to remain on Microsoft's upgrade plan when Amazon's cloud services are adopted.

The server version of Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, will be a viable choice for customers of AWS, as will the Windows Server 2003 R2, 2008 and 2008 R2 offerings which already provide existing support.

AWS's Elastic Beanstalk can be utilized in conjunction with Server 2012; the former is an automatic provisioning and deployment service. Furthermore, it will provide free tier services of up to 750 hours per month, per year of Micro instances - this amount of CPU resources is small and will enable users to develop CPU capacity in the cloud.

According to Amazon, free instances can also allow customers to evaluate Windows Server 2012 through the utilization of a few instances. Visual Studio 2012 will also be supported by AWS.

The AWS general manager for the Windows team, Tom Rizzo, said: "Included with the Visual Studio tools is the AWS Explorer which allows you to see all of your AWS resources without leaving the Visual Studio environment. In addition, you can deploy to AWS with just a few clicks and can decide whether you want to deploy to EC2 instances or use Elastic Beanstalk as the target for your applications."

Microsoft's Window Azure cloud service and cloud infrastructure provider Rackspace also supports Windows Server 2012, which was launched a couple of months ago in September.

Customers will be drawn towards both Amazon and Microsoft following the announcement, according to the founder and principle analyst with ZK Research, Zeus Kerravala. He stated: "It's a win-win. It lets customers try Amazon cloud and Windows Server 2012. Having Server 2012 in the cloud will allow a broader audience to try it to see how it operates and whether they want to commit to production applications. The software upgrade to Windows server is two years."

The research director at Gartner, Nik Simpson, seconded Kerravala's statement: "Amazon was supporting Microsoft Server before Server 2012. They deal with a lot of customers who are Windows shops, so it makes a lot of sense." (CY) Link