Dr. Dobb's | Amazon Web Services Launches ''Elastic IPs''

Amazon Web Services Launches ''Elastic IPs''

Static IPs for dynamic cloud computing

March 27, 2008
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/amazon-web-services-launches-elastic-ips/207000083

Amazon Web Services has launched "Elastic" IP addresses for its Amazon EC2 infrastructure service. Amazon EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud and lets developers obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction.

Developers using Amazon EC2 can acquire Elastic IP addresses -- 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 instead of waiting on a data technician to reconfigure or replace a host or DNS to propagate to all of their customers, developers can work around problems with their instance or software by remapping their Elastic IP address to a replacement instance. Elastic IP addresses let companies host websites, web services, and other online applications on Amazon EC2.

Amazon EC2 also 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 now only requires changing a parameter in an API call. Each Availability Zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered for reliability. 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.

"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."