Amazon EC2 Now with Great New Features

Amazon EC2 just received two very important updates: Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones.

Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing, and now make it easy to host web sites, web services and other online applications in Amazon EC2. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your AWS account, not with your instances, and can be programmatically mapped to any of your instances. This allows you to easily recover from instance and other failures while presenting your users with a static IP address.

This fixes the first major problem that people had with EC2, non-static IP addresses. I have not yet played with this new feature, but I expect to try and give it a demo this week.

Availability Zones give you the ability to easily and inexpensively operate a highly available internet application. Each Amazon EC2 Availability Zone is a distinct location that is engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. Previously, only very large companies had the scale to be able to distribute an application across multiple locations, but now it is as easy as changing a parameter in an API call. You can choose to run your application across multiple Availability Zones to be prepared for unexpected events such as power failures or network connectivity issues, or you can place instances in the same Availability Zone to take advantage of free data transfer and the lowest latency communication.

This feature also will have the potential to help many of those high availability sites that use EC2. We recently learned that Amazon Web Services are not perfect (as the S3 system was down for most of a day), but this hopefully should help insulate EC2 customers from such a fate.

Elastic IP Addresses
Availability Zones