Microsoft Windows Applications on Amazon Web Services: Stakes and Opportunities for Developers and Users.

Following the launching of the support for applications and services running on Linux early in 2012, since December 04, 2012, henceforth Amazon Web Service supports applications that run on Microsoft Windows Server, including : Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2012. For those who unfamiliar, the AWS Marketplace is a place where you can find, compare, and start using a wide variety of applications and technical services in the cloud. Only with your AWS account you pay for what you use. The goal here is to allow you to eliminate on-going hardware and software costs.

Windows instances work seamlessly with existing AWS features like Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Relational Database Service. 

As a Windows Developer, you can list your software in the AWS Marketplace with the possibility to sell it to hundreds of thousands of active AWS customers. In fact to help developer Amazon Web Service shortens the time between discovery and deployment to a matter of minutes, therefore decisions that once took days or weeks henceforth will take just minutes. You can also sell your traditional on-premises software in the cloud using a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model. (Take a look on: Selling on Amazon Marketplace.)For the moment some Windows applications are available in the AWS Marketplace including:

• Parallels Plesk - A control panel for hosting and managing multiple web sites on a single server. 
• Quest Toad - A database productivity tool for DBAs, developers, and analysts.
• MicroStrategy - A comprehensive BI (Business Intelligence) platform.
• SAP Afaria - Mobile device management.