Amazon Web Services leaves beta, introduces SLA and Windows Server

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Computer Cloud) is entering General Availability (GA), after just over two years of operation in beta and the addition of many highly-requested features.

The company is providing an SLA for Amazon EC2, with a service level commitment of 99.95% availability within a region. If availability falls below this level, customers are eligible to receive service credits. The company says its new SLA is designed to give users additional confidence that even the most demanding applications will run dependably in the AWS cloud

Also new is th ability to use Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server. With this announcement Amazon will be supporting the deployment of ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and other Windows-based applications.

Like other services offered by AWS, Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server offers a pay-as-you-go model with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees.

Amazone have also announced future features for the service, including Load Balancing that will nable the system to automatically balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances; Auto-scaling to allow growing and shrinking usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements, automatically managing usage of the AWS cloud on the user's behalf and Monitoring that provides real-time monitoring of operational metrics within Amazon EC2, with better visibility into usage of the AWS cloud.

A new Management Console provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets users configure, manage and access AWS cloud resources is also in the plans.