Amazon Boosts Cloud Computing Capabilities

By Greg McNevin

March 31, 2008: With the popularity of its online storage service shooting upwards, Amazon’s Web Services arm has launched an “Elastic IP” service, which provides static IP addresses for dynamic cloud computing applications.

Along with Elastic IP, the company also announced that it now has the ability to launch compute instances in multiple Availability Zones. When combined, Amazon says these two new features enable its EC2 developers to build more powerful and stable cloud computing applications.

Amazon EC2 is an infrastructure service that provides developers with resizable cloud computing capacity. Elastic IP addresses add to a developer’s arsenal as they can be dynamically remapped on the fly to point to any compute instance in a developer’s account. So rather than waiting on a data technician to reconfigure or replace a host, or waiting for DNS to propagate to all of their customers, developers can now engineer around problems with their instance or software on the fly.

Multiple Availability Zones on the other hand, were once only available to very large companies that needed to distribute an application across multiple locations.

With these two features, Amazon says businesses from start-ups to enterprises can now isolate themselves from common failure scenarios and host high availability websites.

“We’re really excited to answer one of the most consistent developer requests for Amazon EC2–providing a static IP capability,” says Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2.

“We are also excited to give developers the ability to build fault resilient web applications by running in multiple Availability Zones. This capability has been difficult for customers to accomplish on their own without investing significant time, effort and capital expense. Now, all that is required is a simple API call.”

Comment on this story