Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched two new features for its EC2 (Electronic Computing Cloud) service which are Multiple Availability Zones and Elastic IP addresses.  These two features, as per Amazon, will help developers build failure resilient applications in the cloud.  Basically, EC2 now has become a cloud CDN (Content Distribution Network) which places your computing instances at multiple locations.

Multiple Locations

Now developers can keep and execute their instances from multiple Amazon EC2 Locations which are composed of regions and Availability Zones.  An Availability Zone is distinct location that is insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provides connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same region. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location.  This way, developers do not need to worry about one of their instance locations getting down due to unforeseen reasons.

Elastic IP Addresses

Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing and are attached to developer’s account and not to any instance.  Unlike traditional static IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses can be dynamically remapped on the fly to point to any computing instance in a developer’s Amazon EC2 account.  This means that rather than waiting for some technician to reconfigure or replace a host, or waiting for DNS to propagate to all of their customers, developers can now remap their Elastic IP address to a replacement instance.

Amazon Web services has really been making strides in cloud computing and addition of these failover mechanisms will surely make it more attractive for developers.

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