Amazon announced a major coup with pricing for Windows Servers on AWS today. Now you can move your licenses from a physical machine to AWS’ cloud, including all Microsoft server apps, such as server versions of Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and Dynamics CRM.
You can either purchase a new license or migrate your existing licenses through the recently expanded Microsoft Software Assurance program, which earlier this month enabled moving your licenses from a physical server to the cloud. What AWS has done is make this easier, without having to pay for a second license for the cloud-based instance. It is about time that Microsoft has done this, and given the pace of virtualization, a good thing, too.
Amazon made the announcement today at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles. “If you are an ISV and have migration tools that will help customers migrate their existing deployments, now you can extend your offerings to AWS cloud. If you are a System Integrator offering professional services to customers and specialize in above Microsoft Windows Server applications, we would love to hear from you,” the company posted on the AWS blog. Amazon is seeing customers who want to migrate from an earlier, say Server 2003, version to more current versions in the cloud.
