Dear AWS Developers,

We are pleased to announce two significant new features - Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones - which help you to run reliable web sites and other applications within Amazon EC2. Additionally, this release adds the ability to choose between a set of pre-configured Amazon EC2 kernels.



Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing, and now make it easy to host web sites, web services and other online applications in Amazon EC2. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your AWS account, not with your instances, and can be programmatically mapped to any of your instances. This allows you to easily recover from instance and other failures while presenting your users with a static IP address.



Availability Zones give you the ability to easily and inexpensively operate a highly available internet application. Each Amazon EC2 Availability Zone is a distinct location that is engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. Previously, only very large companies had the scale to be able to distribute an application across multiple locations, but now it is as easy as changing a parameter in an API call. You can choose to run your application across multiple Availability Zones to be prepared for unexpected events such as power failures or network connectivity issues, or you can place instances in the same Availability Zone to take advantage of free data transfer and the lowest latency communication.



With these two new features, it is now easier than ever for you to isolate your application from common failure scenarios and host high availability web sites in Amazon EC2.



In addition to these two features, this release adds the ability to configure and override the kernel with which your instance is launched. We have added a number of new Amazon provided AMIs and kernels for you to use. You can see these by downloading the new APIs or tools and using the describe images API. There are also descriptions of the new kernels and AMIs in the Resource Center.



Please visit the following pages for more information:



Sincerely,

The Amazon EC2 Team