EC2 makes some important changes
March 27, 2008
From an email I received earlier today about two new pieces of functionality for Amazon’s EC2 service
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.
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.
More details on the AWS blog. These pieces of functionality and the new kernel functionality really make EC2 a more viable alternative for SMBs and not just startups.
Somewhat related, I am eagerly awaiting the official launch of Assay Depot, since to my knowledge they are the first life science company that is really using AWS consciously as part of their strategy. I had a chance to speak with Chris from Assay Depot at SOT and was quite impressed by what they are doing and even more so by how they are doing it.
Further reading
O’Reilly Radar
Rightscale on Fault Tolerance and Elastic IPs
Technorati Tags: Amazon Web Services, EC2, Assay Depot
Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Biotech, Business, Computing, Software & Internet
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The new features are extremely exciting. There’s still the perception out there that cloud computing is somehow inferior to traditional ways of doing things, it just happens to be cheaper. The new features are a clear indication the cloud noticeably accelerating and surpassing traditional hosting solutions not just in price but even more so in capabilities. Fun times to be on the EC2 platform!
Shameless plug: lots more details and use-cases of the new features on the RightScale blog at http://blog.rightscale.com
[…] at bbgm (here and here). I have also written about Amazon EC2 a lot. Today, Chris Peterson, whom I met at SOT has a writeup on the AWS blog, where he talks about Assay Depot and how the company is leveraging […]