I was just talking about windows/SQL server in the cloud with my buddy James and after reading my blog he was still a little confused about what was going on. So I found a much more interesting link that I think will be more relevant to the average .net hoster here is the relevant information that I think that you will need to get started.

Starting later this Fall, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server. Today, you can choose from a variety of Unix-based operating systems, and soon you will be able to configure your instances to run the Windows Server operating system. In addition, you will be able to use SQL Server as another option within Amazon EC2 for running relational databases.

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. Customers will only pay for as much or little as they actually use; of course the actual price will be higher than Linux-based instances, due to the cost of Windows licenses. We’ll announce specific pricing when we make the service broadly available later this Fall.

Our goal is to support any and all of the programming models, operating systems and database servers that you need for building applications on our cloud computing platform. The ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability. We are currently operating a private beta of Amazon EC2 running Windows Server and SQL Server

 

You can sign up for more information about this from here

After doing some basic analysis about what it cost to relocate some common domains that were more brochure site we figured we could incur a common savings of over 50%. The question still is how is the SQL server instance going to work and replicate across the data centers.

I think the biggest question here is what is microsoft going to do with its cloud and what announcements are going to come out at PDC?