Adam Howitt's Blog

Mar 27
2008

Elastic IP addresses for Amazon

At : 8:38 PM | Link | Amazon EC2 | Comments (3) | Send | 1935 Views |

Amazon launched elastic IP addresses today for EC2. Elastic IP addresses allow you to assign a static ip address to your Amazon instance which makes it far more suitable for hosting your own sites now.

Prior to the launch of elastic IP addresses, your EC2 instances would be assigned an IP address from the pool that was not guaranteed to remain under your power. So if your instance crashed and you had to bring up a new instance, you get a new IP address and, if you were hosting a site on the old IP would now have to login to your domain name provider and update the A NAME record to the new address. PITA.

I just cut WalkJogRun over to an elastic IP address and it was far less painful than I imagined. The process for using elastic IP addresses is as follows:

  • Start an Amazon EC2 instance if you don't already have one
  • Request an IP address using the latest version of the EC2 tools and the ec2-allocate-address command
  • Assign that IP address to an instance id (i-something)
    ec2-associate-address -i i-b3e019da 75.101.157.145
  • Rush over to GoDaddy or wherever your DNS is recorded and change the A NAME to point at this new address.

Read the feature announcement here

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  1. Cool eh! I love what Amazon is doing.

    Posted By noname : Posted At 4/1/08 9:00 AM
  2. A few weeks ago it was Elastic IPs and now it's storage volumes in the cloud. Did you see the new announcement Amazon made? The AWS blog has the official stuff and I wrote some more about how it changes the game at http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/04/13/amazon-takes-ec2-to-the-next-level-with-persistent-storage-volumes/ The Amazon folks are on a roll!

    Posted By Thorsten - CTO RightScale : Posted At 4/14/08 1:02 AM
  3. Hi Thorsten, Thanks for the post - I've just signed up to the waitlist to be considered for the testing phase too. Very interesting.... Adam

    Posted By Adam Howitt : Posted At 4/14/08 12:55 PM
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