Amazon EC2 gets static IPs.

It's about damned time. They've been trying to pretend EC2 is for utility computing...like running large distributed apps for a short period of time. But nobody is using it for that...people want Amazon's network and a cheap way to scale from zero to huge for websites. Now that they've finally embraced that, if they'll just resolve the reliability issues, EC2 will be a fantastic hosting option.

Does this mean emails sent from EC2 will not be automatically marked as spam? (right now I think Hotmail marks all EC2 emails as spam). I read that reverse DNS and PTR records are needed to accomplish this. So, this solves just half the problem?<p>I am asking these as exploratory questions... I don't really have a good grasp on what I am talking about. Please point me to resources.<p>BTW, do you know of any sample Python code that is used to act on incoming emails in the server?

I was speaking with an Amazon WS evangelist last year and he was recommending a 5 server system: load balancer, two web/app servers and two DB servers.<p>The issue I brought up was that you couldn't guarantee colocation, so you might be making DB calls cross-country. If you're using a poorly optimized ORM (untweaked ActiveRecord, Hibernate, etc.), that is issuing tons of queries, the net lag between the app server and the DB could slow you to a crawl.<p>The availability zones seem like the could be an answer to that, but they're being marketed as an answer to disaster recovery and failover. It would definitely be nice to request your app server and DB server are close to each other.

Great to see this development but won't they need a huge block of IP addresses to support this?

Perhaps this is just a coincidence, but interesting nevertheless.<p>This story was submitted to reddit at least two times: the original submission was downmodded to zero (or less), a resubmit eventually to 1. Here, it's at 51 points.<p>I suppose what I want to say is<p>127.0.0.1 reddit.com programming.reddit.com

This is amazing. I am in the process of deploying my webapp, and was considering slicehost due to the static ip's issue.<p>Then I took another look on the aws pages, and, hooray: elastic ip's were introduced yesterday!

Yeah, I was going to use it for my online gambling (legal) site, and found the dynamic IP problem to be the real decision maker for me. I use smartfox server as a socket server, and renewing a license with a new ip address takes 24 to 48 hours, which means death to an online gaming site using social networking.<p>The static IPs make it possible to use AWS now. I can finally add voice chat functionality because of the power behind the large and extra large instances.

so is it much easier to use EC2 as a server now that IPs don't change? IE, you don't need dyndns and/or a load balancer? I wouldn't mind hosting a site of mine on there..

Great news