Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS) customers can now run their Microsoft Windows Server applications within the AWS Free Usage Tier – a program designed to help new AWS customers get started in the cloud.

Developers and businesses with Windows Server applications can take advantage of 750 hours of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Micro Instance usage per month, at no charge for a one year period. With the expansion of the AWS Free Usage Tier, Windows developers now have access to the same free resources on AWS as Linux developers -- providing the ability to launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or gain hands-on experience with AWS.

“Our customers want the flexibility to choose how they build their applications without being locked into a particular programming model, language, or operating system. We continue to focus on increasing that flexibility,” said Peter De Santis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. “Through our continued work with Microsoft, Windows developers now have an opportunity to see, at no cost, how they can leverage Amazon Web Services’ scalable and cost-effective computing environment.”

Organizations of all sizes are taking advantage of the breadth and capabilities of running Windows Server applications on AWS. For example, when redesigning Treasury.gov, which is powered by AWS, the United States Department of Treasury integrated their current Microsoft SharePoint 2010 workloads to improve technology efficiencies, provide increased collaboration capabilities, and comply with the Federal Cloud First Initiative. Knovolo, a mobile marketing firm, runs their Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server applications on AWS. Integrating these applications with Amazon EC2 and Amazon CloudFront services to develop, manage and deploy their mobile marketing application has allowed them to reduce costs and scale as needed by paying only for the capacity used.

The AWS Free Usage Tier addition joins a number of recent AWS service extensions to support Windows customers, including Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 on the high power Cluster Compute instances, Microsoft SQL 2012 beta preview on AWS, Microsoft BizSpark Licenses on AWS, and support for Microsoft Windows HPC clusters using Amazon EC2 instances.