This article was published on January 16, 2012

Amazon expands its free AWS cloud hosting offering to allow Windows Server applications


Amazon expands its free AWS cloud hosting offering to allow Windows Server applications

Internet retail and hosting giant Amazon has announced this morning that it has expanded the free usage features on its AWS platform to allow customers the chance to trial Windows Server applications within its AWS Free Usage Tier.

The new feature, designed to help customers that are new to the company’s hosting services and wish to test out its features, will provide users with up to 750 hours to test Windows Server applications on their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Micro Instance per month, for free for a one year period.

The addition of Microsoft Server will extend the same level of service as Linux developers, providing the ability to build, test and launch new applications or gain an overview of how Amazon’s AWS service operates, before they mull the idea of subscribing.

Amazon has slowly built out its Windows offerings, recently delivering Windows Server 2008 RC2 instances on its high power Cluster Compute instances, adding Microsoft’s SQL 2012 beta preview, BizSpark licenses for startups backed by the Redmond-based software giant and support for Windows HPC clusters using Amazon’s EC2 instances.

This led to the United States Department of Treasury integrating its Microsoft SharePoint 2010 workloads to improve technology efficiencies, helping businesses and government agencies (which Amazon is now certified to assist) move their services to the cloud.

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