Today Amazon launched the public beta allowing Windows
Server 2003 instances on the Elastic Computing Cloud - something
they announced a while back and that we've been asking for.
Amazon is applying their simple 'pay as you go' model with the
default instance being $0.125 per hour ($3.00 per day). The
default instance is specified as 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute
Unit,160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform. This runs
an IIS server nicely. There are also larger instances
available, including 64-bit and SQL Server.
If you saw my talk at Umbraco Codegarden US you saw a demo of Umbraco
running on an IIS server at GoGrid with a MySql server running at
Amazon. Now one can create Linux and Windows instances at
both Amazon and GoGrid - like apples.
GoGrid has a clear advantage in terms of a friendly management
interface. Amazon provides a command line interface, though third-party
tools such as ElasticFox do help a bit.
Not being one with much patience I have already started a
Windows instance at Amazon and have installed Umbraco with SQL
Express. The process took 15 minutes or so - not bad for a
first go. As soon as Umbraco v4 Beta 2 is available I will create a
public AMI with Umbraco installed and ready. All you'll need
to do is start the instance, navigate to the public DNS name, and
Umbraco will be available. Instant gratification - which I
favor. I'll post the AMI link here and you'll also be able to
find it in the public AMI list from Amazon.
With Microsoft's PDC coming up next week in LA it'll
be interesting to see what they unveil in terms of offerings
similar to Amazon and GoGrid. I'll be at PDC and will post
here as soon as I know.