Amazon Web Services today announced the public beta of new features for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The new features purport to allow for simple and automatic monitoring, scaling, and traffic control using cloud resources.
“Monitoring cloud assets, scaling capacity automatically, and balancing traffic efficiently have been among the most requested Amazon EC2 features from our customers,” said Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. “Together, these capabilities provide customers more control of their AWS resources and enable them to architect for even better performance, resilience and cost savings.”
The new features are threefold. Amazon CloudWatch is a web service for monitoring AWS cloud resources; Auto Scaling permits automatic growing and shrinking of Amazon EC2 capacity based on demand; and Elastic Load Balancing distributes incoming traffic across Amazon EC2 compute instances.
CloudWatch gives Amazon customers visibility into resource use, operational performance, and overall demand patterns, including metrics such as CPU use, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. Auto Scaling ensures EC2 usage increases during traffic spikes to maintain performance and decreases during lulls to reduce costs, making it particularly appropriate for apps with frequent use fluctuations. Elastic Load Balancing allows for fault tolerance in applications, detects unhealthy instances within a pool, and reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored.
Amazon hopes these features will improve application performance, lower costs, and make life easier for developers and entrepreneurs. Amazon CloudWatch and Elastic Load Balancing are available on a pay-as-you-go basis, and Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and carries no additional fees. Features are currently available in the U.S. and should be available in the EU shortly.
