Today Amazon launched its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in Europe, where it joins Amazon’s CloudFront and Simple Storage Service (S3) as an option for European developers. This means companies using Amazon Web Services can host the data and run their applications in Europe, rather than hosting the data in Europe and running the apps in the U.S. This cuts down on latency and the costs of sharing data between EC2 and S3 in Europe. However, those in Europe will have to wait for the opportunity to run Windows Server and SQL Server on EC2 — features that are available in the States.
Readers should also take a look at the two existing European clouds: ElasticHosts (ourselves, http://www.elastichosts.com) and FlexiScale. Compared to Amazon, ElasticHosts offers lower prices when bought by subscription, fully flexible server sizings and full control over your operating system installation.