Both VMware and Citrix have entered the cloud computing space with their virtualization technologies. Now, Microsoft and Amazon are entering this space too. Amazon has been offering cloud computing services for a while with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon is expanding its offerings by adding Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which is a dynamic virtual machine in Amazon’s data center. EC2 supports the following Operating Systems:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• OpenSolaris
• Fedora
• Windows Server 2003
• openSUSE Linux
• Gentoo Linux
• Oracle Enterprise Linux
• Ubuntu Linux
• Debian

Several types of software are available as well including, but not limited to:

• Oracle 11g
• Microsoft SQL 2005
• MySQL
• Apache HTTP
• IIS/Asp.Net

Interestingly enough, EC2 is powered by Xen.

Microsoft isn’t sitting still on the cloud computing initiative either. Microsoft recently announced something called the “Azure Services Platform“. Azure is a combination of several services by Microsoft (some new - some not so new). One of the services offered is SQL Services. I have personally been testing Microsoft SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) for a while now. It looks like SSDS is rolled up in to Azure now. Microsoft Azure includes:

• Live Services
• .NET Services
• SQL Services
• Microsoft SharePoint Services
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services

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