Expanding the Cloud: Microsoft Windows Server on Amazon EC2

The main problem that will need to be overcome for this to get kind of traction - licensing that is generally pretty outdated or brain-dead.

Unless you have an enterprise license, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc - all tend to license on a per CPU or per Core basis...

It's really annoying. Because you'll have some whizzbang J2EE app that you want to run. However, instead of popping it onto your scalable IBM WebSphere cluster, you put in a dedicated WebSphere instance. I've seen it happen and done it myself many times.

Why? Because it's CPU licensed. And the cluster has 10 CPUs that you'll 20% utilise. But it's still licensed as 10 CPUs. So it's much cheaper to license for 2 dedicated CPUs and take the operational hit (and probably environmental hit).

Cloud computing is meant to be licensed like a utility - proprietary software is going to have to catch up. Hopefully they've got the licensing situation sewn up with this.

"There are many different reasons why customers have requested Windows Server; for example many customers want to run ASP.NET websites using Internet Information Server and use Microsoft SQL Server as their database. "

I guess they're moving beyond startups then. What are the licensing implications for suddenly requesting 400 instances of your Win2K8 box?

Afterthought: are the kinds of places that use Windows server (older larger corporates) likely to want cloud computing?

I think this sounds pretty cool:

"In addition, several customers would like to maintain a global single Windows-based desktop environment using Microsoft Remote Desktop, and Amazon EC2 is a scalable and dependable platform on which to do so."

I could see that being a real cost saver for a lot of organizations. I wonder how tolerable the lag is with remote desktop to EC2.

Interesting to note this announcement coming prior to the PDC (late October) where Microsost is expected to talk more about their cloud story. Makes me wonder if Amazon and other 3rd parties will be central to it. Also makes me wonder if there is going to be some new Windows Server licensing model that makes sense.

I'm sure they have some slightly modified version of the standard SPLA agreement. Windows instances will probably cost slightly more per hour to cover the monthly license cost of whichever version someone's running.