Amazon releases elastic IPs - so you can resolve your domain name to your AWS instance

The availability zones was another big one so that you can be more certain that 3 machines in a cluster aren't all going to accidentally go down at the same time since they are running on the same physical machine.

And the new easier to use persistent storage is, IMO, the last thing necessary to make ec2 a reliable/usable solution. There are lots of difficult solutions for persistent storage now (replicating data between availability zones, frequently backing up to s3, running the data from s3 permanently via an s3 mount) but having easy to use persistent storage will be the final piece, IMO.

Supposedly this is in testing and will be generally available "later this year" http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/04/block-to-the-fu.html

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I got an e-mail from the ec2 support folks reminding me that I should shut down one of my long running instances since the kernel it has is incompatible with the soon-to-be-released persistent storage. So, I guess this is encouraging that they will be releasing it in the near future.

To prepare for shutting down that instance and moving it to a new instance I switched to an elastic IP for that server. One note on elastic IPs: you reserve the IP, then you assign it to an instance-ID, it starts to be used for that instance-ID and the OLD IP you had for that instance-ID gets released back to the pool.

So...before you assign the elastic IP to the instance IP get your DNS ready ;)

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