[meat-eater]

This new feature addresses what I think is the biggest complaint about EC2, as seen on their discussion boards. People used to complain about the lack of static IPs, now that's no longer a problem. Once they get around to rolling out this feature to the public, the only legit complaint that people would have for them is the base cost when starting out.

When your traffic is zero or very low, as in the case of when you're just starting out, a conventional VPS host is still a lot cheaper. But the good thing with AWS is that it's easy to port your apps to run on their platform.

[wanorris]

"But the good thing with AWS is that it's easy to port your apps to run on their platform."

Once you have mountable volumes, you can pretty much run the LAMP-style stack of your choice unmodified, right?

[LogicHoleFlaw]

Pretty much. You essentially get your persistent read-write /var filesystem. You can keep the read-only parts of your system in your boot image. Unix has a long heritage of working in such an environment. It's a natural fit.

[wmf]

The next low-hanging fruit is auto-restarting instances, so you don't have to have two instances just to babysit each other.