HANNOVER, Germany—Amazon Web Services, which is rapidly catching up to Amazon.com's retail division and will soon become the Web 2.0 company's bread-and-butter business, on March 3 launched a new option for the European Union region that allows software developers to run Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server in the cloud.

Developers now can use Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) to run Windows Server and SQL Server and allow customers access to Windows-based computing resources on the nearly 3-year-old AWS cloud—the oldest, most established public cloud service on the Internet.

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The AWS Management Console also will provide support for Amazon EC2 in the European Union, enabling developers to manage their Amazon EC2 resources in the EU region using a point-and-click Web interface.

Information on when the services will be available in North and South America wasn't made available at the CeBIT conference held here March 3 to 8.

Amazon EC2, launched in August 2006, provides resizable computing capacity in the cloud for businesses and developers. EC2 with Windows immediately became a standard environment for deploying business applications using the Microsoft Web Platform, including ASP.NET, AJAX, Silverlight and IIS (Internet Information Services).

Amazon EC2 also supports the SQL Server Express and SQL Server Standard databases.

AWS currently has more than 490,000 registered developers. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) currently contains more than 40 billion objects.

CEO Jeff Bezos said recently Amazon.com's Web services business is now taking a full two-thirds of the company's bandwidth online and increasing Amazon.com's revenue in substantial measure.