Amazon Enhances Cloud Scalability, Management of EC2

Amazon Web Services is launching a number of new features for its cloud computing environment designed to make it easier for customers to manage their use of the compute resources.

The features announced May 18 range from new abilities for scaling the compute resources on Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) to balancing the workloads across those resources.

The new offerings will give EC2 users greater control over the cloud computing resources, which will help them increase performance and lower costs, said Peter DeSantis, general manager of Amazon EC2.

“Monitoring cloud assets, scaling capacity automatically and balancing traffic efficiently have been among the most requested Amazon EC2 features from our customers,” DeSantis said in a statement.

Amazon’s CloudWatch Web service gives users greater visibility into how they’re using the resources, how those resources are working and patterns in demand, from network traffic to CPU utilization. Users can select the EC2 instance that they want to monitor, and CloudWatch will begin collecting and storing data that customers can access using Web service APIs or CLTs (Command Line Tools).

Customers also can use Amazon’s Auto Scaling feature to ramp EC2 capacity up or down, depending on need. The capability lets businesses have the necessary resources when demand spikes, then pare back when it eases, Amazon officials said.

Elastic Load Balancing lets users distribute workload traffic across multiple EC2 instances, improving fault tolerance. The feature also will automatically reroute traffic away from resources that might be down, and then redirect the traffic back once those resources are back up.

EC2 users in the United States can access these features immediately; those in Europe will have to wait for a few months, Amazon officials said.