Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) was cool enough with its initial platform. Now it is offering Windows support on the EC2 platform. Thanks to Jesper's Blog for the tip.

Like a lot about the EC2, this turns out to be really convenient for developers. Did you ever want to develop or test a Windows Web app on a real server, not just your test desktop, and not have to get a real server to do it? Now you can just virtualize up a Windows server in the cloud and it's yours: A virtual server running Windows Server 2003, SQL Server and all the .NET stuff preinstalled.

A security white paper from Amazon describes the configuration of the Windows system images available and their differences from a standard Windows Server installation. Setup from the user's standpoint looks really easy; Jesper said it took him 5 minutes.

A Security Configuration Wizard walks you through an attack surface reduction process, which helps you to turn off services that are not needed and restrict communications channels that should not be permitted. In the end you can save the image and spin off new ones to meet your new standards as necessary.

EC2 is a great development for developers and a great way for Amazon to leverage all the work it has put into building its infrastructure. I see a lot of opportunities available.