Great news from Amazon. Only 2 months or so to go before they publicly roll out Windows Server and SQL Server on Amazon EC2.

As the blurb from their site notes, this will be ideal for ASP.NET web sites:

Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server provides an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. By choosing Amazon EC2 as the deployment environment for your Windows-based applications, you will be able to take advantage of Amazon’s proven scalability and reliability, as well as the cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing model offered by Amazon Web Services.

There’s a private beta currently in play. No pricing information appears to be available as yet.

The strange thing about this is that Amazon seem to have beaten Microsoft the party on this one. Why hasn’t Microsoft attempted to offer this already (other than alluding to Red Dog)? Perhaps they are too caught up with the SQL Server data services model instead.