Microsoft Office 2010 Amazon launches pre-emptive

Microsoft is gearing up to go large with its programs for its own version of its hosted improvement platform later on this month. But Amazon.com isn;t sitting idly by, awaiting Microsoft to rain on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).On October 1,Windows 7 Serial, Amazon introduced that it ideas to supply developers this drop the ability to run Windows Server or SQL Server by way of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Based on the Amazon Internet Providers website, “the capability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been 1 of our most requested features,Windows 7 Serial, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability.”Update: More on Amazon;s Windows-hosting ideas can be found on Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels; blog.Further details from the Amazon Web Solutions internet site:“Starting later this Fall, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the capability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server. Today, you can choose from a variety of Unix-based operating systems, and soon you will be able to configure your instances to run the Windows Server operating system. In addition,Microsoft Office 2010 Key, you will be able to use SQL Server as another option within Amazon EC2 for running relational databases.”Amazon currently is conducting a private beta for testers of hosted Windows Server and SQL Server, according to its web site. Amazon is requesting developers interested in using the service fill out a form on the web page. The form asks what kinds of applications and services developers plan to build in an Amazon-hosted Windows environment.Amazon is positioning its hosted Microsoft offerings as “an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based aplications.” Amazon is touting the new Microsoft offerings as part of its plan to “support any and all of the programming models, operating systems and database servers that you need for building applications on our cloud computing platform.”Microsoft, for its part, has been rumored to be building a hosted advancement platform for more than a year. The company is slated to announce the platform officially at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles in late October when Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President of Microsoft;s Server and Tools Business, is slated to unveil Microsoft;s “cloud computing platform” during his keynote on October 27.Microsoft is known to be working on a low-level “cloud OS” that is code-named Red Dog. Red Dog is expected to harness the power of multiple, distributed systems in a datacenter so that cloud apps can be more scalable and easier to write. And Zurich — Microsoft’s extension of its .Net programming model to the cloud — is part of Microsoft;s cloud platform, as well,Microsoft Office 2010, based on various folks in the know. Microsoft;s SQL Server Data Companies and its “Velocity” distributed caching technology are likely to figure in Microsoft;s hosted dev offering, too, as will its virtualization technologies. (The 3PAR blog has a nice explainer of how Hyper-V and virtual storage fit together to enable utility computing.)Microsoft will be fielding its hosted improvement environment in an increasingly crowded space. Google,Office 2010 Download, Salesforce.com and Oracle are all bidding for pieces of developers; hosted attentions. But for now, Amazon is the huge dog.“Amazon has a lot to learn about serving the enterprise. It;s not their forte. The self-service startup and departmental markets, no problem. Major enterprise? It;s hard to counter Microsoft;s field resources,” said a source of mine, who requested anonymity. But he said he wouldn;t be surprised if Amazon has a plan there, too.What do you think of Amazon;s new move? Would you rather host your Windows apps in an Amazon cloud — or a Microsoft-hosted 1?