Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that is part of Amazon's hosted web services products has announced that within the coming months at the end of 2008, it is planning to make available to the public, EC2 for Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as the ability to use SQL Server database option within the EC2 environment.

"Starting later this Fall, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server...In addition, you will be able to use SQL Server as another option within Amazon EC2 for running relational databases." - Amazon

With this announcement comes the ability to host highly scalable ASP.NET sites, high performance computing (HPC) clusters, media transcoders. Both for 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows Server and the use of many of the present features of EC2 such as Elastic IP Addresses, Availability zones,and Elasic Blog Store with Remote desktop access.