Amazon advances further into the cloud

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) recently made a number of positive moves to help gain wider appeal with corporate users and advance its market dominance in the “cloud.”

The company’s cloud computing infrastructure is based on the Xen virtualization technology and dates back to a beta launch of August 2006. Now, two years later, Amazon is ready to move the ball forward with the announcement that EC2 is out of beta and into full production mode.

[ Read more about cloud computing in the InfoWorld special report “Inside the emerging world of cloud computing.” ]

Being in beta didn’t seem to stop developers and businesses from launching applications and services on the technology. But to make the service even more palatable, Amazon announced that the company is going to put in place a service-level agreement (SLA) for their offering. The Amazon EC2 SLA guarantees 99.95% availability of the service — if something goes wrong, customers are eligible to receive service credits back.

Amazon said the new EC2 SLA is designed to give customers additional confidence that even the most demanding applications will run dependably in the AWS cloud.

But why stop there? Amazon added that customers can now employ Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server with all of the performance, reliability, and scalability benefits that people have grown to expect from the EC2 service.

“When we launched Amazon EC2 over two years ago, the idea of accessing computing power over the Web was still a novel idea. Today a diverse array of businesses drawn by the benefits of cloud computing — cost savings without giving up speed, reliability, flexibility, and performance — are running EC2 for all types of applications,” said Peter De Santis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. “We’ve listened closely to our customers for the past two years and worked backward from their requirements, adding important new features such as those we are announcing today — Windows support and a service-level agreement.”

The company also unveiled plans to roll out additional features and enhancements in 2009. They include:

• Load Balancing – Enables customers to balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 compute instances.
• Auto-Scaling – Automatically grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements.
• Monitoring – Enables customers to monitor operational metrics of Amazon EC2, providing even better visibility into usage of the AWS cloud.
• Management Console – Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets customers manage and access their AWS cloud resources.

The new Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server offers a pay-as-you-go model with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees. Pricing for using Windows Server with Amazon EC2 begins at $0.125 per compute hour.

VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix, as well as the entire Xen Community, will have to keep an eye on what Amazon is doing in this space. VMware announced their cloud initiative last month at VMworld 2008, and Microsoft is making announcements around its own operating system for the creation of Web apps being labeled as “Windows Cloud.” Even U.S. hosting company RackSpace is trying to get into the game with its own Xen-based initiative.

The cloud could be getting crowded, but Amazon looks like it’s leading the pack.