Does a cloud service like Azure or EC2 exist which can run arbitrary workloads? (e.g. Client SKUs of Windows)

Question

Azure and EC2 are optimized for running servers. Lots and lots of servers. Both platforms attempt to manage tons of things for you -- in Azure's case, it wants to manage even the target operating system.

However, I'd like to use such a service for a different reason: Testing.

I've got a ton of operating systems I need to support. My tests don't actually take that long, but running them on every platform is time consuming. I was going to just use a cloud service for this, thinking that these machines would be running for much less than an hour, and it wouldn't cost all that much.

The problem is that the major cloud services won't run client versions of Windows -- Windows Server only.

Is there a cloud service which would let me run every client and server version, and every service pack level, of Windows released starting with Windows 2000 SP4 to the present day?

Answer 1

Try CloudSigma, Defiantly can upload your own ISO's and run any x86 and 64bit OS you like on it. They have their in-house versions to get started but you can bring your own OS versions.

Based in Switzerland but they would have also the servers in the US, performance i've expected to quite good. https://www.cloudsigma.com/

There is also a free trail on at the moment
https://cs.cloudsigma.com/accounts/signup/