Highly available EC2 deployments: Elastic IPs and Availability Zones

Amazon has beefed up their Elastic Cloud services by allowing developers to dynamically allocate up to five static IP addresses and assign them to any of your EC2 servers.  Amazon calls this new feature Elastic IPs.  This allows developers to swap IP addresses from machine to machine on the fly depending on failure or changing requirements:

Amazon’s new Elastic IP (EIP) addresses allow users to allocate an IP address and assign it to an instance of their choice. What’s really cool is that each IP address can be reassigned to a different instance when needed. For example, if the first one failed or if a new one is supposed to take its place.

The RightScale blog has an excellent write up on the new features and the possibilities this brings. The main takeaway is that EC2 is now fully capable for deploying production, high-availability applications.

The second big announcement is the introduction of Availability Zones.  This means you can bring up EC2 instances in Amazon datacenters in different regions of the world as needed.  From All Things Distributed:

Availability Zones allow the customer to specify in which location to launch a new EC2 instance. The world is divided up into Regions and a Region can hold multiple Availability Zones. These Zones are distinct locations within a region that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same region.