

Expanding the Cloud: Microsoft Windows Server on Amazon EC2 - RyanGWU82
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/09/amazon_ec2_with_microsoft_wind.html

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jwilliams
The main problem that will need to be overcome for this to get kind of
traction - licensing that is generally pretty outdated or brain-dead.

Unless you have an enterprise license, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc - all tend
to license on a per CPU or per Core basis...

It's really annoying. Because you'll have some whizzbang J2EE app that you
want to run. However, instead of popping it onto your scalable IBM WebSphere
cluster, you put in a dedicated WebSphere instance. I've seen it happen and
done it myself many times.

Why? Because it's CPU licensed. And the cluster has 10 CPUs that you'll 20%
utilise. But it's still licensed as 10 CPUs. So it's much cheaper to license
for 2 dedicated CPUs and take the operational hit (and probably environmental
hit).

Cloud computing is meant to be licensed like a utility - proprietary software
is going to have to catch up. Hopefully they've got the licensing situation
sewn up with this.

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nailer
"There are many different reasons why customers have requested Windows Server;
for example many customers want to run ASP.NET websites using Internet
Information Server and use Microsoft SQL Server as their database. "

I guess they're moving beyond startups then. What are the licensing
implications for suddenly requesting 400 instances of your Win2K8 box?

Afterthought: are the kinds of places that use Windows server (older larger
corporates) likely to want cloud computing?

~~~
thwarted
Licensing will end up killing proprietary operating systems chances of running
the cloud. Dealing with licensing is like dealing with long distance -- people
still put up with that?

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arockwell
I think this sounds pretty cool:

"In addition, several customers would like to maintain a global single
Windows-based desktop environment using Microsoft Remote Desktop, and Amazon
EC2 is a scalable and dependable platform on which to do so."

I could see that being a real cost saver for a lot of organizations. I wonder
how tolerable the lag is with remote desktop to EC2.

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KrisJordan
Interesting to note this announcement coming prior to the PDC (late October)
where Microsost is expected to talk more about their cloud story. Makes me
wonder if Amazon and other 3rd parties will be central to it. Also makes me
wonder if there is going to be some new Windows Server licensing model that
makes sense.

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mrkurt
I'm sure they have some slightly modified version of the standard SPLA
agreement. Windows instances will probably cost slightly more per hour to
cover the monthly license cost of whichever version someone's running.

