Amazon continues to tweak their webservices (S3, EC2, SimpleDB, etc...) to respond to the needs of the users. Over the last month, three major enhancements have been announced.

Changes in EC2

Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) has become popular with many companies for providing virtual servers on demand - in a distributed environment for a low cost (Wikipedia: EC2). Two factors have kept many new customer's from using this service: dynamic IP addresses and a lack of persistent storage.

On March 26th, Amazon announced two new features for EC2: Elastic IP Addresses (which helps to fix the dynamic IP address issue), and Availability Zones.

Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing, and now make it easy to host web sites, web services and other online applications in Amazon EC2. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your AWS account, not with your instances, and can be programmatically mapped to any of your instances. This allows you to easily recover from instance and other failures while presenting your users with a static IP address

Availability Zones give you the ability to easily and inexpensively operate a highly available internet application. Each Amazon EC2 Availability Zone is a distinct location that is engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. Previously, only very large companies had the scale to be able to distribute an application across multiple locations, but now it is as easy as changing a parameter in an API call. You can choose to run your application across multiple Availability Zones to be prepared for unexpected events such as power failures or network connectivity issues, or you can place instances in the same Availability Zone to take advantage of free data transfer and the lowest latency communication.

Not to leave the other major concern behind, Amazon announced on April 14th that they were in the process of developing persistent storage for EC2.

Lower Data Transfer Fees

This week Amazon also announced that data transfer fees across all of their webservice offerings were going down.

Premium Support

One of the improvements that promises to make more large companies take a serious look at AWS is the inclusion of Premium Support. This feature was announced on April 16th.

Conclusion

Do these features make you more interested in using AWS for some of your core infrastructure? It will certainly interesting to see how things continue to develop as Google's App Engine has been released into beta-land and promises to spice up the competition.