Amazon expands its cloud by getting Windows

[byteonic]

Sharing an article that I wrote on my blog.
Thanks,
Anand
www.byteonic.com
Article Link: http://tinyurl.com/49n5a6

Article Text Excerpt:
================
Amazon announced that it will offer the ability to deploy Microsoft
Windows Server and MS SQL Server on Amazon EC2. This has multiple
implications:

1. Having the ability to run Microsoft on EC2 would accelerate the
enterprise adoption of cloud computing especially favoring Amazon EC2.

2. Running MS Windows Server would bring Windows based development
tools/technologies to Amazon EC2.

3. Having enterprise grade products such as from Windows and Oracle on
EC2, would accelerate innovation on Amazon’s cloud environment. For
example, there might be a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering
leveraging these products and also Amazon’s resources such as S3 and
SQS.

4. Presents an opportunity for Windows based high volume web sites
(for example plentyofish.com) to consider migrating to Amazon EC2.
This might mean that traditional managed hosting business models may
experience slower growth in the future.

5. May affect the business of cloud providers based on Windows
environment. For example services such as Flexiscale, and GoGrid may
experience slower growth.

The MS Windows on Amazon EC2 will be offered sometime later this fall.
However the licensing for Windows instances will be slightly higher
than the Linux based instances. Overall this is a good thing for
developers and companies that want to try out Amazon’s cloud because
of the availability of a wider choice.

[scottxu]

I am new to cloud computing and try to learn some basics. Could I ask
a naive question:

When people initialize an EC2 instance, is the storage associated with
the instance local to the physical computer where the instance is
running ? When the EC2 instance is stopped, does the content on its
storage go, or it is persistent between instances ? Thanks in advance.

Scott