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The Amazon EC2 team announced that they added two new features yesterday:

• Elastic IP Addresses
• Availability Zones

Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses associated with your AWS account rather than your EC2 instances. These addresses can be programmatically mapped to any instances that you have. What this allows is easier recovery in case of failure as well presenting your users with a static IP address (i.e. less DNS headaches).

The second new feature, availability zones, are made for high availability:

“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.”

Both of these features are very exciting as they address some of the current pitfalls of EC2. Read the official release here.

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