A few days ago, Amazon announced that they would be supporting Windows on EC2. IMO, you’d have to be mad to dream of running a server on that platform, so I was totally like “meh”.
However, James Murty pointed out the perfect use case that I’d missed:
Although I much prefer “Unixy” platforms for my own development, I can imagine situations where it would be very handy to have a Windows machine easily available — such as for running those vital but irritating programs that are only made available for Windows. Australian Tax Office, I’m looking at you…
He’s spot on! This is a great use case. If you need to do a little ‘doze work, a quick recompile, or a connect to another stupid platform-limited service — indeed, like the Irish tax office’s Revenue Online Service, for that matter — simply fire up a ‘doze instance, do your hour’s work, SDelete any private files, and shut it down again. All of that will cost 12.5 cents.
This will save me a lot of pain with VMWare, I suspect…
More techie details at RightScale; a trial run.