Windows support is now live at Amazon Web Services. They've also upgraded their current EC2 service to "full production" status with an SLA (removing the "Beta" label).

Quoted: My colleagues and I have spent the week building up anticipation for this post on Twitter. After you read this post I am sure that you will agree that the wait was worthwhile. The hallways at Amazon have been buzzing...

AWS is soon going to have Windows instances available!

Quoted: Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a set of services that together form a reliable, scalable, and inexpensive computing platform 'in the cloud'. These pay-as-you-use cloud computing services include Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon FPS, and others .

Amazon just shipped their new attachable volume service for EC2. Now you can mount a persistent store to your instances, and not worry about them disappearing if your instance crashes or is de-commissioned.

Pricing is $0.10 per GB per month plus $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests. Back-of-the-napkin estimate for a 100GB volume used for a high volume web site would cost $36 per month.

Rightscale provides tools to provision and automatically adapt the size of your AWS server instances to meet changes in demand. They got a couple of recommendations from the attendees at our Startpad Countdown lecture with Jeff Barr this week.

Quoted: RightScale provides a platform and consulting services that enable companies to create scalable web solutions running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that are reliable, easy to manage, and cost less. Try it FREE!

This looks like a great addition to Amazon S3 and EC2 - they now have a way of creating simple tables with up to 256 attribute/value pairs. Support for GET, PUT, DELETE, and QUERY.

There are a number of things missing over a real relational database (or even an ISAM). S3 is a simple "blob" store - where each object get be atomically read and written. SimpleDB gives some simple query capability (for smaller data items - 1K max per attribute).

I also see no way to get ORDERBY functionality and, of course, no aggregate values (SUM, MAX, etc). Sometimes this can be overcome in the application layer, but it will make your application more complex than using a traditional database.

Most importantly, there are no JOIN's in this system. This will require the application to make multiple QUERYs to get the data needed to generate a view.

I found it very interesting that this document states that Amazon promotes developers running traditional databases in EC2. My understanding is that Amazon can arbitrarily wipe the state of any machine on EC2 - which would cause you to have to restore the database from some an S3 or external backup.

Maybe someone who is using EC2 for running a database server can chime in on how well that works for them.

Quoted: Amazon SimpleDB - a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. Provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity

$50,000 business plan contest. Deadline 10/28/07.

Quoted: Online shopping for Startup Challenge from a great selection of Help; Startup Project, AWS home page, Make Money home page, FAQ, Confirmation, Prizes, Rules & more at everyday low prices.

Web interface to make sample requests to Amazon's suite of web service products

Quoted: Amazon Web Services has created an exciting platform for deploying web applications based on Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service. If you are considering using EC2 and S3, AWS-Console will make your life easy.