If there was any single issue with EC2 that was harder to overcome than any other — at least mentally if not physically and/or technically — is was that of not having access to a static IP that you could rely upon being there regardless of what machine it was mapped to.
That has now changed…
Amazon.com: Homepage: Amazon Web Services
We are excited to announce Elastic IP addresses and Availability Zones, two features that were among the top requests of Amazon EC2 developers. These new capabilities allow developers to achieve greater reliability and redundancy for their applications in the cloud, especially hosting websites. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses can be dynamically remapped on the fly to point to any Amazon EC2 instance. Also available is the ability to launch instances in multiple Availability Zones, each with its own reliable, physically independent infrastructure, which allows developers to build fault resilient web applications through simple API calls.
Of course if there was any other single issue that was the source of significant pain and/or worry it was that of not having the ability to guarantee against single (hardware) server meltdown, or in other words, there was no ensure that if you have multiple instances running that these same instances were not running on the same physical piece of hardware. As per above, that has now changed as well.
*SWEET*! :D Thanks, AWS!
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/
The Amazon folks are on a roll!
With the addition of the storage volumes there's no doubt in my mind anymore: the cloud adopters will have much more computing horsepower and flexibility at their fingertips than those who are still racking their own machines. Cloud computing is going to be as significant for deployment as agile is for software development. You either compute in the cloud or you'll be left behind by your competitors because they can deploy faster, better, and cheaper than you can.