SaaS: Amazon EC2 for Windows == Disappointment
October 27, 2008
I’m currently working on a Windows PowerShell Snap-In for EC2 now that they have released “Windows” support. Note that the snap-in project is in very early stages of development and I should be publishing a preview release that supports running and terminating instances very shortly.
That said – I am largely disappointed that Amazon isn’t providing Windows 2008 support yet. I just used my Describe-Image Cmdlet to list out the EC2 images for Windows.
As you can see the images aren’t for Windows 2008, and from what I can tell they aren’t planning on supporting Windows 2008 until early next year. This effectively means that GoGrid is out in front of Amazon for support of Windows despite the fact that they don’t have the same feature set of Amazon.
Interesting Times Ahead
Interesting times indeed, especially in the context of what Microsoft is planning on doing with Windows Azure. My advice is to start getting your stuff into the cloud now with GoGrid and EC2, so that you are in a good position to leverage the Azure services platform – but plan on plugging into things like Live Framework in the medium term.
