Elastic IP’s and Availability Zones - Amazon’s Two New Offerings For EC2
Posted in News, WebMaster by DB
Great news from Amazon today. According to the email I received today, Amazon has just launched Elastic IP’s and Availability Zones for all application instances running on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
EC2 Background
Some of the biggest critics of Amazon’s EC2 framework have always pointed out that a lack of Static IP Address on your production system was a cause for concern and until now you had to work with a Dynamic DNS provider to keep your application up and running. With the launch of Elastic IP’s, Amazon, it seems has clearly been listening to all the disgruntled voices.
Elastic IP Address
Elastic IP’s give you the flexibility of associating a Static IP Address to your AWS account. Actually you have a choice of using 5 Static IP Addresses. Once you are assigned an IP Address, all you need to do is associate it with an already running instance or start up a new instance with the Static IP Address. Previously restarting your EC2 production instance would mean a new IP address. Now using the bundled API tools, all you need to do is bring up the instance and associate it with your previously assigned static IP Address. No more changing your DNS setup, no more running Dynamic DNS tools on your server and the best part is no more waiting for your DNS to propagate.
Availability Zones
The other major announcement today was the launch of availability zones. An availability zone is a distinct zone within a particular region. Remember housing your mission critical application within a single datacenter is at the end of the day a definite single point of failure no matter how thoroughly redundant the datacenter is. While Amazon has only opened up a single region (US) so far for use, by launching and making available multiple availability zones within the same region ensures complete and total redundancy for your application.
You can now launch instances within a particular availability zone and by simply having multiple instances running in multiple zones your end users will experience reduced latency and a system/application that in theory should be available at all times, in other words you achieve the ultimate goal of 100% uptime.
Conclusion and Amazon Wish List
Amazon has continuously strived to make their web services the option of choice for web hosting and related tasks. By addressing these lingering issues in EC2, Amazon has once again set the benchmark in cloud computing. What would be absolutely fantastic is if they now open up multiple regions as well. Just imagine being able to run specific application instances targeted for specific country and location based users.
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April 7th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
[...] me give you an example. I recently posted about the Amazon EC2 framework and the launch of Elastic IP’s. Actually it was more of an update, nothing in depth and nothing planned. What has surprised me was [...]
April 17th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
[...] recently blogged about Amazon’s Elastic IP offering and how this would impact Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. By addressing one of the [...]