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Amazon EC2 goes live, past its beta!

AWS blog

Here's what's happening today:

  • Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone.
  • There's now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2.
  • Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2.
  • Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2.
  • We plan to release an interactive AWS management console.
  • We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services.

Let's take a look at each of these items in turn.

Production - After a two year beta period, Amazon EC2 is now ready for production. During the beta we heard and responded to an incredible amount of customer feedback, adding support for powerful features such as Availability Zones, Elastic Block Storage, Elastic IP Addresses, multiple instance types, support for the OpenSolaris and Windows operating systems, and (as of today) a Service Level Agreement. Regular EC2 accounts are allowed to run up to 20 simultaneous instances. Requests for hundreds and even thousands of additional instances are granted all the time and can be made here.

SLA - The new EC2 Service Level Agreement works at the Region level. Each EC2 Region (there's only one right now but there will be more in the future) is divided into a number of Availability Zones. The SLA specifies that each Region will be available at least 99.95% of the time. Per the SLA, a Region is unavailable if more than one of its Availability Zones does not have external connectivity.



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