Microsoft and Amazon have reached an agreement that allows the latter to begin letting customers run their Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server database software using its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The ability to run Windows on EC2 has been one of Amazon's most popular features, according to the company. Amazon added its goal is to support "any and all" programming models, operating systems, and database servers needed to build applications on its cloud platform, OSes and databases in EC2, according to Amazon.

"You will be able to use Amazon EC2 to host highly scalable ASP.NET sites, high performance computing (HPC) clusters, media transcoders, SQL Server, and more. You can run Visual Studio (or another development environment) on your desktop and run the finished code in the Amazon cloud," Amazon wrote in an official blog post announcement on Wednesday.

The EC2 platform currently runs applications using various UNIX-based operating systems. Moreover Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reportedly told a TechNet audience in London on Oct. 1 that Microsoft will announce a "Windows Cloud" in four week's time.

Among Microsoft's competitors in the Internet cloud-computing space is Google, with its Google Apps and Google Gears applications, but Ballmer reportedly said that Google "doesn't have much for enterprise."

The addition of Oracle that took place last week as well as the one of Microsoft shows Amazon has big plans.

Microsoft announced it will begin offering customers of its Elastic Compute Cloud utility computing service the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server instances as a service by the end of this year. Until now, EC2 customers could choose among Unix-based operating systems, but couldn't run Windows or SQL Server applications in Amazon's cloud.