Cloud computing ball moves forward for smaller websites
Amazon just announced a few nice features for EC2 users, Elastic IP and Availability Zones.
Elastic IP allows users to associate an IP address with their web services account, rather than being tightly coupled to a specific EC2 instance.
The benefit is being able to more quickly recover from an instance failure. Presumably one might be able to move to an alternate instance without making any DNS changes, or if the static IP address was being used for a service, there would be no need to update that either.
The Availability Zones have been a heavily requested feature. What it does is guarantee that two instances are actually on different hardware, thus allowing for extremely high availability.
Others may wish to keep instances in the same zone, ” to take advantage of free data transfer and the lowest latency communication.”
All in all, this is great news for web publishers who can now enjoy a high level of reliability with both modest cost and a relatively easy deployment .