Dave Laribee

"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

.NET: Coming to a Cloud Near You

I was very happy to hear the news that Amazon will be providing Windows/SQL support on their EC2 cloud computing service. From the email announcement:

We are excited to let you know that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server starting later this Fall. Today, you can choose from a variety of Unix-based operating systems, and soon you will be able to configure your instances to run the Windows Server operating system. In addition, you will be able to use SQL Server as another option within Amazon EC2 for running relational databases.

I've been waiting for this option. For a long time the LAMP stack has held a distinct (and unarguable) advantage in long tail plays; much easier to find the kinds of virtual, on-demand models associated with "cloud computing." With this, I see that gap narrowing.

Even so, during this time of low availability, new architectures might have had a chance to sneak into the (at times monolithic) .NET developer community. When we reach for a persistence solution for our next killer web apps will it be SQL Server 2008 or a distributed hashtable?

Published Oct 01 2008, 09:26 PM by Dave Laribee

Filed under: .net, cloud-computing, infrastructure

Comments

Craig said:

This is really cool. The only great advantage LAMP had over the .NET Windows stack was that it was much cheaper to setup and scale Linux systems. Windows can scale just as well, it will just cost a lot more. Hopefully EC2 will help to address this.

# October 2, 2008 12:07 AM

Andre de Cavaignac said:

For a .NET based distributed cache, take a look at the Microsoft Velocity project.

It is definitely interesting and a welcoming change to see .NET on EC2, although, even as a long time .NET developer, I don't think ASP.NET has much of a name in the world of silicon valley and web startups. This has remained true, despite Microsoft's efforts to make Windows more scalable (Windows HPC server, PowerShell, etc are all examples of this). I'm not sure if ASP.NET on EC2 is going to address this..

# October 2, 2008 3:13 AM

Dave Laribee said:

@Andre - My main interest is in having the capability. One thing we can count on (outside of The Valley) is that B2B applications written in .NET now have a compeling cloud option.

# October 2, 2008 7:49 AM

Ben Scheirman said:

Yeah, but didn't you hear? Stallman says cloud computing is teh suck.

# October 2, 2008 9:38 AM

Scott said:

I'm wondering if this could be an alternative to using a VPN to connect to my house PC. Put a small || large instance on EC2 and use it for dev work? Create a new instance for beta installs?

Weirder yet, create an instance running Hyper-V server and host multiple computers. ;)

# October 2, 2008 3:08 PM

Mike Moore said:

Hmmm, I think both non-relational database/distributed hashtable and cloud computing using .NET are interesting topics...

# October 2, 2008 4:10 PM

Sage said:

have you checked out goGrid at all? I got an account a short while ago and loaded 2 VMs. I have to say it is a nice offering plus they can do Load Balancer as well. Im with you though, nice that amazon is finally rolling this out so I can use it with my S3. Plus, i wasnt too keen on trying to use the AWS image with Mono to run asp.net

# October 8, 2008 3:58 PM

Josh said:

By the way, the link in the post to the Bigtable article links to the ACM website, which requires ACM membership or purchase of the individual article in order to read the whole thing. Google has a freely accessible copy of the article at: labs.google.com/.../bigtable.html

# October 15, 2008 9:22 AM

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