AWS EC2 gets more real(world)
The Amazon Web Services blog has announced some additions to Amazon EC2 that make it all that more viable for real world, production operations.
We just added three important new features to Amazon EC2: Elastic IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and User Selectable Kernels. The documentation, the WSDL, the AMI tools, and the command line tools have been revised to match and there's a release note as well.
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The Elastic IP Addresses feature gives you more control of the IP addresses associated with your EC2 instances.
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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.
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Finally, the User Selectable Kernels feature allows users to run a kernel other than the default EC2 kernel. Anyone can run a non-default kernel, but the ability to create new kernels is currently restricted to Amazon and select vendors.
EC2 becomes more viable as a commercial grade, virtual data center utility with each new feature. I'll be interested to see what this does to the service's adoption by both corporate IT and SaaS players with SLAs to maintain.
I had a discussion with a developer about these new features today. When you realize they've only been around for two years, I think they are growing into their potential quite well.
Posted by: bruce fryer | 27 March 2008 at 04:47 PM