New Features for Amazon EC2 - Now You Can Truly Scale Applications

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) allows customers build secure, fault-tolerant applications that can scale up and down with demand, at low cost. One of the core features for achieving this kind of efficiency and fault-tolerant is the ability to acquire and release computing resources in a matter of minutes according to demand.

While Amazon’s EC2 has been great so far in allowing companies to run large, computational-heavy distributed tasks on the background, it has been really lacking on allowing companies to run online services in a manner that’s efficient and reliable.

The reason for this lack of support is basically because there was no way to do load balancing on EC2 machines allowing a service to efficiently scale across multiple EC2 instances.

With the launch of Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon is effectively making EC2 a viable host for online services, not just background jobs. Using these services you can not only scale a service across machines for reliability, you can also automatically add and remove computing resources as demand increases\decreases driving your operation costs down.

You can find more information at the detail pages for Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing and on the AWS developer weblog. Also, check out Werner Vogel’s blog post for some background on how Amazon is horizontally scaling its services.