Amazon Web Services LLC, an affiliate of Amazon.com, Inc., today launched Elastic IP addresses and the ability to launch compute instances in multiple Availability Zones, two new features that enable Amazon EC2 developers to build even more powerful and fault resilient applications in the cloud. These new capabilities enable developers to achieve greater reliability and redundancy for all of their applications, including hosting websites. These two features were among the top requests of developers using Amazon EC2. Amazon EC2 is an infrastructure service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud and allows developers to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction.

Starting today, developers using Amazon EC2 can acquire “Elastic IP” addresses, which are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses can be dynamically remapped on the fly to point to any compute instance in a developer’s Amazon EC2 account. This means that rather than waiting on a data technician to reconfigure or replace a host, or waiting for DNS to propagate to all of their customers, developers can now engineer around problems with their instance or software by quickly remapping their Elastic IP address to a replacement instance. Elastic IP addresses make it easy for companies to host websites, web services, and other online applications on Amazon EC2, enabling a new range of customers to take advantage of Amazon’s elastic, on-demand, cloud computing offering.

Also starting today, Amazon EC2 provides the ability to programmatically place instances in multiple Availability Zones. Previously, only very large companies had the scale to be able to distribute an application across multiple locations. Amazon EC2 has now made this as easy as changing a parameter in an API call. Each Availability Zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable. Availability Zones have independent networking, power, and cooling, and separation from risks such as flood and fire, helping an application to run uninterrupted across a wide variety of failure scenarios. This ability to inexpensively and conveniently run in multiple locations gives Amazon EC2 users the same powerful capabilities that Amazon uses to keep its websites highly available.

With these two new features for Amazon EC2, businesses ranging in size from startups to enterprises can now isolate themselves from common failure scenarios and host high availability websites.

“We’re really excited to answer one of the most consistent developer requests for Amazon EC2–providing a static IP capability. Elastic IP addresses will make it easier for companies to take advantage of web hosting on Amazon EC2,” said Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. “We are also excited to give developers the ability to build fault resilient web applications by running in multiple Availability Zones. This capability has been difficult for customers to accomplish on their own without investing significant time, effort and capital expense. Now, all that is required is a simple API call.”

“Elastic IP addresses and the addition of multiple Availability Zones for Amazon EC2 made it easy for us to improve resilience and scalability of the virtual resources supporting Sport Relief,” said Martin Gill, Head of New Media for Comic Relief. “In just a couple of hours we delivered a perfect service to more than 250,000 BBC TV-driven unique visitors – despite the traffic being very ‘peaky.’ Using Elastic IP addresses we have created a highly reliable solution to balance and serve high volumes of traffic, and have also made use of the newly released Availability Zones to establish location-based resilience. We see this as a fantastic development within the AWS tool kit.”

“Supporting Elastic IP and Availability Zones makes complete sense for enterprise users of Amazon EC2," said Bob Zurek, CTO, EnterpriseDB, an enterprise open source database company. "These are very high-value features for those who require a way to ensure an IP address is always available. EnterpriseDB's Cloud Edition beta users have frequently requested static IP support. This is great news for enterprise users."

With uses of Amazon EC2 ranging from activities such as web hosting, graphics rendering, and web crawling to genomics analysis, large parallelized batch processing and financial modeling, businesses in every industry and of every size are taking advantage of the instant scalability that Amazon Web Services provides. Over 330,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services.