Amazon adds new features to EC2

Ok, I swear, I don’t secretly work for Amazon, but I probably should seeing how I talk about them so much here. Today, Amazonannounced two new features as part of their Elastic Computing Cloud program.

First, elastic IP addresses. For an extra cent an hour, you can have more control over the IP address related to your EC2 instance. This is huge. Now you can load-balance or point certain processes over to EC2 and be able to work with a known IP address.

Second, you can now specify where your EC2 instance lives. This will allow you to manage downtime or other faults by quickly kicking over to another data center if need be.

Availability Zones give you additional control of where your EC2 instances are run. We use a two level model which consists of geographic regions broken down into logical zones. Each zone is designed in such a way that it is insulated from failures which might affect other zones within the region. By running your application across multiple zones within a region you can protect yourself from zone-level failures.

Third, you can now specifiy what kernel you’d like to run. I assume many developers have written code for a certian kernel or only want to work on certain kernels, and now they can specify which kind they’d like.

Here’s some more feedback from around the blogosphere today: here and here.

Rightscale has also posted some tutorials on how to use the new features, including how to set up a fault-tolerant site.

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Written by: Mike | March 27, 2008 | Filed Under Amazon AWS 

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