Amazon adds resilience to cloud computing service

by Mikael Ricknäs

March 27, 2008 —

Amazon
Web Services is adding new features to its hosted service platform Elastic
Compute Cloud (EC2) to improve availability.

Elastic Compute Cloud is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity
in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers,
according to Amazon.

Two new features will be added to the platform: Availability Zones and Elastic
IP Addresses.

With the Availability Zones function, applications can be placed in multiple
locations so that if one location fails, a second one can take over. While EC2
users have been able to build such functionality themselves, they can now achieve
the same effect with an API call, Amazon said.

Developers can also use what Amazon calls Elastic IP addresses to simplify
address management. These are static, but can also be dynamically remapped on
the fly to point to any instance in an Amazon EC2 account.

The feature makes it possible for developers to work around problems by moving
an address to a replacement instance, instead of waiting for DNS to propagate
changes or a data technician to reconfigure or replace a host.

British charity organization Comic Relief, which use Amazon's services to host
some of its web sites, has tested both features and plans to start using them
in its production environment, according to Ben Steel, new media developer at
Comic Relief.

"Elastic IP addresses give us a certain amount of persistency. We can
for example power up and down a server without having to change DNS settings,"
said Steel.

He also sees benefits with the Availability Zones feature. "It gives us
a certain amount of redundancy," he said.

Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with other web services from Amazon, for example
Simple Storage Service (S3) and SimpleDB.

IDG News Service