Amazon Strengthens Hosted Computing Service

Amazon will be adding new features to its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to shore up its availability and reliability.EC2 is a "true virtual computing environment" that is "designed to make Web-scale computing easier for developers," in Amazon's description. The new features provide more flexibility for developers by enabling them to choose where their application runs.

One feature, Availability Zones, lets people have separate servers instances to provide redundancy to their applications. "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. Instead, developers can place an application in multiple locations so that if one fails, another can take over.

The second feature, Elastic IP addresses, are static IP addresses that can be remapped on the fly. This way developers can just move an address to another EC2 instance in case of problems without making it more difficult for their users to find the application.InfoWorld, CNET News