In an exercise in vendor neutrality – well, kinda – it’s not exactly altruistic – Amazon Web Services is now offering a bunch of pre-built virtual instances of the Windows Server 2012 operating system, the server version of Windows 8, so Windows users can hew to Microsoft’s upgrade roadmap and still adopt Amazon’s cloud all at the same time.
The addition, which includes SQL Server, was announced this week by Amazon’s Windows team leader Tom Rizzo, a recent refugee from Redmond.
Amazon already supports Windows Server 2003 R2, 2008 and 2008 R2 but Server 2012 can be used with Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk automatic application provisioning and deployment service as well as EC2.