Amazon launches Windows.. BUT

Yesterday Amazon launched a new EC2 Version including support for Windows and SQL Server.

Unfortunately it only runs Windows 2003 Server and SQL Server 2005. Now that we are all happy about Windows 2008, the new IIS7, the new URL Rewriting features and so on.

This really is a pity. I’d really like to use Amazon EC2, but I don’t want to take two steps back in development. Once you worked with IIS7 you don’t want to switch back to the old and clumsy IIS6. Especially URL Rewriting is so nice with IIS7.

There is a thread running on the EC2 Forum, but until now noone from Amazon replied. If you’re registered there you might want to drop a reply, too: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=25660.

UPDATE:

Thanks for all of your feedback. Our intention is to support the widest variety of options for our customers that we can. We are already working to support Windows 2008 in EC2, and anticipate being able to offer it publicly in the early part of next year.

6 comments ↓

#1 Jay Adair on 10.24.08 at 5:02 pm

I think that’s a bit critical 🙂 There’s no fundamental difference between the two platform pairs, at least in my experience. URL rewriting is really simple with ISAPI_Rewrite and something I’ve used a lot, and SQL Server 2008 doesn’t bring a lot to the table, apart from spacial data-types which are of interest to me, but that was never really going to be a reason to spend a lot of money upgrading.

Still, it’s great that Amazon are doing this. I’ll have a closer look soon.

#2 benb on 10.24.08 at 10:22 pm

@Jay
No fundamental difference? You must not be seriously doing .NET applications and/ or using IIS7. It offers a LOT more than plugins like rewriting, it offers far superior performance, integrated pipeline, less broken compression and so on. Anyone that says there is not a big difference between IIS6 and 7 is severely mistaken. Try getting MVC running on IIS6 in any real way without installing 3rd party components, or taking a huge performance hit. IIS6-7 is night and day.

#3 andreas.kraus on 10.25.08 at 4:04 pm

I totally agree with benb here. Fortunately I deployed my first MVC Application directly on IIS7. My dedicated Servers are all running Windows 2008 with IIS7 already, the migration was really painless.

As said, once you worked with IIS7 and felt the difference – which is truly there – you don’t want to go back.

#4 Alex on 10.26.08 at 2:13 am

I definitely agree that IIS7 is a big change in terms of how it works with .NET. I hope Amazon makes Windows 2008 available soon — I’m sure it is mostly a matter of time. Still, most apps work fine on IIS6, so I’m sure that they just wanted get that out there first. With Microsoft about to make their own big announcement about Cloud computing, I’m sure they were rushing to get this out to beat that announcement.

#5 Jay Adair on 10.26.08 at 4:40 pm

Okay, looks like I need to do some more reading 🙂

#6 uwe on 07.21.09 at 12:41 pm

We’re going to host a massive Silverlight based streaming site on EC2 and on Azure in parallel.

IIS6 will put a huge load overhead on the AWS infrastructure in comparison to IIS7 with adaptive/smooth streaming. But hey, I don’t care if Amazon needs to work harder to supply our demand. Traffic is cheap and we keep the option to switch entirely to MS. Although we don’t like the basics MS is offering.

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