At the time of my first post on Moving to the Cloud, Amazon announced new Windows Server 2008 EC2 instances, based on EBS instead of S3. I've been playing with these for some time now and must say they resolve most of the issues I have with Windows Server 2003 instances:
- Launching an instance is much faster, approximately 5 minutes compared to approximately 20 minutes for old Windows Server 2003 instances. Bundling, however, still takes approximately 20 minutes in both cases.
- Regional settings are no longer reset to defaults on every launch.
- Applications using DPAPI now work correctly (in old Windows Server 2003 instances, machine key got replaced on every launch, thus giving you an error "Key not valid for use in specified state" when you tried to decrypt data encrypted in previous session.
Another useful addition are so called spot instances. When using these, you no longer pay a regular price (currently $0.12/hour for small instance), but a price determined by supply and demand, which is currently around $0.07/hour for small instance). This reduces your Amazon monthly bill quite a lot. Also, spot instances can be set to start at a specified time, so if you know when you need to work on your instances, you can set their launch in advance and avoid waiting for them to start.
All in all, Windows Server 2008 EC2 instances are a big step forward, although using Windows Server 2008 on EC2 is still a bit tricky comparing to using it on a real hardware. Most notably, you still need to bundle your instance after installing windows updates or new software on it. Also, using an additional EBS volume for your data is a must.
If you want to get wet, here's a nice step by step guide on how to start your Windows Server 2008 instance on Amazon EC2.