Amazon EC2 raises the bar

Two new EC2 features that significantly raise the bar. This is getting interesting:

Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing, and now make it easy to 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.