Amazon announced that it will offer the ability to deploy Microsoft Windows Server and MS SQL Server on Amazon EC2. This has multiple implications:

1. Having the ability to run Microsoft on EC2 would accelerate the enterprise adoption of cloud computing especially favoring Amazon EC2.

2. Running MS Windows Server would bring Windows based development tools/technologies to Amazon EC2.

3. Having enterprise grade products such as from Windows and Oracle on EC2, would accelerate innovation on Amazon’s cloud environment. For example, there might be a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering leveraging these products and also Amazon’s resources such as S3 and SQS.

4. Presents an opportunity for Windows based high volume web sites (for example plentyofish.com) to consider migrating to Amazon EC2. This might mean that traditional managed hosting business models may experience slower growth in the future.

5. May affect the business of cloud providers based on Windows environment. For example services such as Flexiscale, and GoGrid may experience slower growth.

The MS Windows on Amazon EC2 will be offered sometime later this fall. However the licensing for Windows instances will be slightly higher than the Linux based instances. Overall this is a good thing for developers and companies that want to try out Amazon’s cloud because of the availability of a wider choice.