Amazon announcements: General Availability (99.95%) and Windows on EC2. Windows cost benchmarked at 25-40% over Linux to provision!

Amazon have done it - they have committed to "General Availability" (GA) with a service level agreement of 99.95% within a "Region". If availability falls below this level, customers will receive service credits. Read more information at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla

In a simultaneous announcement Amazon have announced that Windows and SQL Server images are now available on EC2 - pricing for Amazon EC2 running Windows 2003 Server begins at $0.125 per compute hour (see below). Amazon are also supporting SQL Server Express and Standard editions on EC2. The only restriction is that all instances must be in the same availability zone - read details at: http://aws.amazon.com/windows/.

Pricing comparisons are below - so now there's a benchmark: Windows costs between 25-40% over Linux to provision!

Instances

Standard Instances	Linux/UNIX	Windows
Small (Default)	$0.10 per hour	$0.125 per hour
Large	$0.40 per hour	$0.50 per hour
Extra Large	$0.80 per hour	$1.00 per hour

High CPU Instances	Linux/UNIX	Windows
Medium	$0.20 per hour	$0.30 per hour
Extra Large	$0.80 per hour	$1.20 per hour