Today we have some important news for our Amazon EC2 customers who are running Windows Server and Windows SQLServer instances and who have been looking to extend their coverage for fault-tolerance and locality reasons. Starting today Windows instances can be launched in an additional Availability Zone is the US and they can also be launched in two Availability Zones in Europe. This allows developers who use our Windows instances to build solutions that can tolerate various failure and recovery scenarios. It also puts Windows Server into the hands of developers who want low latency for their European customers.

We have also integrated these features into the Amazon AWS console, such that you now can use the console to launch instances in any of our regions, regardless whether it is Europe or the US. Popular third party tools such as Elastic Fox also have been upgraded and provide additional functionality such as advanced naming an tagging.

Rolling out services and features globally is very important to us as it allows our customers to take a uniform approach to serving their customers world-wide.