My Experience With Windows on Amazon's EC2

Being a developer of websites for Amazon Associates, I've long been an advocate of Amazon Web Services. Recently, I decided to give Ec2 for Windows a try. Don't get me wrong, I use Linux web servers for all my business servers, but I had a computing task that I thought Windows on Ec2 would be well suited for.

During my normal website marketing activities, I typically will build a very large Google Site maps, XML files with 40,000 urls, and anywhere from 5-22 per site. To do this, I run a website crawling application which pulls 15 urls every 4 seconds. Now my server is a dual quad core processor, capable of serving hundreds of pages per second.

The problem:
1. Building my site maps quickly to get my new websites indexed quickly, and to let Google know some of the deeper pages of site content.
2. Making use of my server's capability.
3. Not run the crawling application on my desktop

My Solution:
1. Run multiple instances of my crawler on various Windows via Amazon Ec2.
2. Launched 5 instances, quickly and easily right from my browser.

What I discovered? The new cloud computing model is going to make another revolution in computing that I don't yet believe has been fully appreciated. I envision that companies such as Adobe may offer their applications more affordably via Amazon Ec2 amis or computer images (think Norton Ghost). This will create new sales channels for software vendors, and possibly bring more of a user base for their applications.