Amazon Web Services has announced that it is offering Microsoft Windows Server 2012 instances through its EC2 cloud computing service. Its Elastic Beanstalk deployment and provisioning service also supports the new operating system, and Amazon is offering prebuilt Windows Server 2012 images that include Microsoft SQL Server 2012 running on its Elastic Block Store cloud storage. In addition, developers will be interested to know that Amazon’s support includes integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 through the AWS Explorer.
Amazon also announced that it would be adding Windows Server 2012 to its “free tier.” This program offers up to 750 hours of EC2 “Micro Instance” compute time every month for one year.