Amazon EC2 got even better -- cloud computing has arrived.
Amazon EC2 introduced two new features recently: Elastic IP addresses and Availability Zones. With these two much awaited features, I strongly believe that cloud computing has arrived. If you haven't started using EC2 yet because you thought cloud computing was too bleeding edge and unreliable for your liking, it's time to take a second look. If you have been using it, but were seriously worried about not having a phone number to call when an instance goes down, your calls have just been answered.
Elastic IP addresses are loosely equivalent to round robin DNS addresses/ multiple A records for a domain. In some ways it's even a step ahead because you don't need to worry about wrongly cached DNS entries and propagation. Clients continue to send requests to the same IP address and once the request enters the EC2 network, it's mapped to a different server.
Availability zones are analogous to having multiple co-locations/ data centers. The idea is that a network/power outage (or in even more extreme cases physical calamity) won't mean that your application is completely down -- an isolated set of servers in a different co-location/ data center continue to serve requests.
These two features are very important because they make up for the inherent reliability issues with cloud computing instances and take cloud computing a step closer to being a serious alternative to conventional server infrastructure.
Cloud computing has the potential to make reliable web scale infrastructure a commodity available to everyone, as opposed to an exclusive expertise available with a few large companies. And that means companies can focus on building applications without losing sleep over infrastructure reliability and scalability issues -- a huge step forward.
Elastic IP addresses are loosely equivalent to round robin DNS addresses/ multiple A records for a domain. In some ways it's even a step ahead because you don't need to worry about wrongly cached DNS entries and propagation. Clients continue to send requests to the same IP address and once the request enters the EC2 network, it's mapped to a different server.
Availability zones are analogous to having multiple co-locations/ data centers. The idea is that a network/power outage (or in even more extreme cases physical calamity) won't mean that your application is completely down -- an isolated set of servers in a different co-location/ data center continue to serve requests.
These two features are very important because they make up for the inherent reliability issues with cloud computing instances and take cloud computing a step closer to being a serious alternative to conventional server infrastructure.
Cloud computing has the potential to make reliable web scale infrastructure a commodity available to everyone, as opposed to an exclusive expertise available with a few large companies. And that means companies can focus on building applications without losing sleep over infrastructure reliability and scalability issues -- a huge step forward.
