Amazon EC2 now offers STATIC IPs
Posted by jonchase
This is great news for any Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) developer - up until this point, hosting web sites on EC2 has been a little tricky due to the fact that EC2 instances used dynamic IPs - making it tough to set up reliable load balancing and failover in the face of ever-changing IP addresses.
From the email I just received (below), it looks like this may no longer be an issue. Also in the email is the announcement of Availability Zones - groups of EC2 instances in different physical locations and networks, which will help ensure that if your site goes down in one availability zone, your instances in another zone won’t be affected.
Here’s the email:
Dear Amazon EC2 Developer,
This is a quick note to let you know about some exciting changes with Amazon EC2. We are happy to announce two significant new features - Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones - which help you to run reliable web sites and other applications within Amazon EC2.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.
With these two new features, it now easier than ever for you to isolate your application from common failure scenarios and host high availability web sites in Amazon EC2.
For more information on how to best leverage this new functionality, please see our Feature Guides for Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones.
Sincerely,
The Amazon EC2 Team
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