Amazon Web Services adds 'resiliency' to EC2 compute service

Amazon Web Services on Thursday is scheduled to release features meant to give its hosted computing service a better safety net.

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service now has an application programming interface (API) that lets developers choose where its application physically runs.

This Availability Zones feature is important because people can now add redundancy to their application. Choosing multiple zones, people can have server instances with separate power, cooling, network access, and physical servers.

"Up until now, if you boot up more than one EC2 instance, you had no control where it resided--it could hypothetically be sitting on the same machine because there is no notion of location or proximity," said Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations at Amazon Web Services.

"Now we're exposing that as a feature and you can choose to instantiate your 'nth' server in a different availability zone," he said.

Amazon Web Services last month suffered a multi-hour outage to its Simple Storage Service (S3), which affected several Web 2.0 sites.

Selipsky said the new feature will let developers add redundancy in the "vast majority" of cases.

Amazon currently gives developers the option of deploying their S3 data either in Europe or the United States.

Selipsky said Amazon will add more "granularity" on the choice of location for data over time.

Also on Thursday, Amazon Web Services introduced a IP service, called Elastic IP, that lets developers have an IP address associated to an account, rather than a physical machine.

The change makes EC2 better suited for Web application hosting, Selipsky said.

[tvoneicken]

Now also EC2 storage volumes

A few weeks ago it was Elastic IPs and now it's storage volumes in the cloud. Did you see the new announcement Amazon made? The AWS blog has the official stuff and I wrote some more about how it changes the game at http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/04/13/
The Amazon folks are on a roll!

With the addition of the storage volumes there's no doubt in my mind anymore: the cloud adopters will have much more computing horsepower and flexibility at their fingertips than those who are still racking their own machines. Cloud computing is going to be as significant for deployment as agile is for software development. You either compute in the cloud or you'll be left behind by your competitors because they can deploy faster, better, and cheaper than you can.