Blog
Contact Us 
Today Amazon made a couple of interesting announcements. First off they have opened a new region (Northern California) with multiple availability zones (analogous to data centers, but each on separate flood plains and electrical grids). This further increases their computing capacity and also puts data closer to all of the start-up’s in the Bay area that rely on Amazon. The also have a US-East region, EU region and will have regions in Asia in 2010.
The key announcement however centers around some changes and enhancements to EC2 (their virtualized computing layer). One of the main criticisms and design challenges with EC2 has been around the fact that when you shut down a server, the state of that server is lost (unlike VMWare). There were ways around it (such as storing all data on EBS (analogous to a mounted drive on your virtual instance), but it did present some challenges. Today they announced the availability to save server state with a new Stop command, which unlike Terminate, saves the state of that running server.
This feature is enabled because you can also now boot from EBS, instead of S3. This leads to a faster boot time, and also makes it easier to tune your kernel or make other changes to an image. Upon boot you can also mount multiple EBS volumes which can lead to some very robust configurations.
Another challenge of EC2 was creating an image (AMI) of a server once you had it set up. This was fairly easy for a windows instance (using the Bundle process) but was more difficult for a Linux instance. Now you can use the CreateImage command to create a new AMI and register it in one easy step. See all the details here.
These are great enhancements to EC2 and are a welcome addition to the AWS offering.
