What's New
This What's New is associated with the 2009-03-01 release of Amazon EC2. This guide was last updated on April 15, 2009.
The following table describes the important changes since the last release of the Amazon EC2 Developer Guide.
| Change | Description | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
|
Reserved Instances |
Amazon EC2 now supports an additional pricing option. With Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, you can make a low one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance. For information on Reserved Instances, see Reserving Amazon EC2 Instances for Long-Term Use. |
11 March 2009 |
|
Windows in Europe |
Amazon EC2 now supports the ability to launch Windows-based instances in the European region. For more information on Windows bundling tools, see Bundling a Windows AMI. For information on regions and Availability Zones, see Regions and Availability Zones. |
3 March 2009 |
|
ec2-migrate-image |
Amazon EC2 has a new command-line tool to help migrate AMIs from the US region to the European region.
The |
3 March 2009 |
|
Windows Bundling Tools Updates |
Slight changes were made to the Amazon EC2 Windows bundling tools. For more information on Windows bundling tools, see Bundling a Windows AMI. |
23 January 2009 |
|
Signature Version 2 |
Added information about signature version 2, which is a more secure method for signing Query requests. For more information, see Query API Authentication. Also updated the guide to indicate that HTTPS is required for SOAP requests. For more information, see Request Authentication. |
15 December 2008 |
| Regions | Amazon EC2 now supports the ability to launch instances in multiple geographically distinct regions. These currently include the United States and the new region for Europe. For more information, see Regions and Availability Zones. | 10 December 2008 |
| 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 is immediately 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 only contains the data in your volume that has changed since your last snapshot. Previous snapshots of your volume continue to be available until they are deleted. For more information, see Amazon Elastic Block Store. | 20 August 2008 |