This is cool. You can now associate a static IP address with your EC2 instances. No more mucking about with 10-minute DNS timeouts or dynamic DNS routines. You can also elect to start certain instances in multiple locations using “Availability Zones”
These new features will make it a little easier for people to deploy larger web sites and services without quite as much management overhead. There’s also some rumblings in the forums that Amazon is actually working on immutable storage for EC2 images, which would pretty much complete the puzzle for most. A good bit of the custom scripts and routines people come up with for running on EC2 is to get around this “limitation”, although, truth be told, a good part of dealing with that is having a good backup plan, which you really should have anyway – EC2 just forces the issue 🙂