What's New
This What's New is associated with the 2008-08-08 release of Amazon EC2. This guide was last updated on November 21, 2008.
The following table describes the important changes since the last release of the Amazon EC2 Developer Guide.
| Change | Description | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| Windows Operating System | Amazon EC2 now offers the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 operating system on all Amazon EC2 instance types. For more information, see Amazon EC2 Running Windows. | 22 October 2008 |
| Elastic IP Improvements | Amazon EC2 is upgraded with a series of networking improvements that result in faster remapping of elastic IP addresses. Additionally, when an address is disassociated, the connection will immediately be broken so you can reconnect to other instances. These changes are transparent and do not affect the APIs or command line tools. | 22 October 2008 |
| Amazon EBS | Amazon EBS enables a single Amazon EC2 instance to attach to a highly available, highly reliable storage volume of up to 1 TB of data. Once attached, applications on a single Amazon EC2 instance can read or write from the Amazon EBS volume similar to a disk drive. With Amazon EBS, an Amazon EC2 instance can now be terminated without losing the data that resides on the Amazon EBS volume. One use case involves running a relational database within an Amazon EC2 instance, but maintaining the data within an Amazon EBS volume. For more information, see Amazon Elastic Block Store. | 20 August 2008 |
| Amazon EBS Volume Snapshots | Amazon EBS provides the ability to take point-in-time snapshots of your data, which are then stored in Amazon S3 for long term durability. Snapshots can also be used to create new Amazon EBS volumes from an existing data set or to restore a volume to an older version. Snapshots are point-in-time consistent and incremental to minimize Amazon S3 costs. This means that a snapshot will only contain the data in your volume that has changed since your last snapshot. Previous snapshots of your volume will continue to be available until they are deleted. For more information, see Amazon Elastic Block Store. | 20 August 2008 |
| Amazon EC2 Public AMI Unique SSH Host Keys | Amazon EC2 public AMIs generate unique SSH host keys each time you launch an instance. This enables you to get the host SSH keys from the console output and verify the host to which you are connecting. For more information, see Remove SSH Host Key Pairs and ec2-get-console-output. | 1 July 2008 |
| New fstab Bundling Behavior | The Amazon EC2 ec2-bundle-vol command option
--fstab now bundles AMIs using /etc/fstab.
The new option --generate-fstab bundles the AMI using an
Amazon EC2-provided fstab. For more information, see
ec2-bundle-vol.
|
1 July 2008 |
| Minor Edits | Numerous minor edits were made based on forum and feedback comments. | 1 July 2008 |
| CPU Instance Types | Amazon EC2 now provides two new High-CPU instance types: c1.medium and c1.xlarge. These instance types have a higher CPU to memory ratio and are designed for processing-intensive applications. For more information, see Instance Types. | 29 May 2008 |
| Elastic IP Addresses | Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your account, not specific instances. Any elastic IP address that you associate with your account remains associated with your account until you explicitly release it. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or availability zone failures by rapidly remapping your public IP addresses to any instance in your account. For more information, see Elastic IP Addresses. | 27 March 2008 |
| Availability Zones | Amazon EC2 now provides the ability to place instances in multiple locations. Amazon EC2 locations are composed of regions and availability zones. Regions are geographically dispersed and are in separate geographic areas or countries. Availability zones are separated from each other, but located in the same region. For more information, see Availability Zones. | 27 March 2008 |
| User-Selectable Kernels | Amazon EC2 now enables you to select the kernel and RAM disk to bundle your AMI with or to specify a kernel and RAM disk at launch time. For more information, see Kernels, RAM Disks, and Block Device Mappings. | 27 March 2008 |