Amazon announced three new features today that are mentioned below:

1. Elastic Load Balancing: Serves as a load balancer for distributing incoming traffic across EC2 instances and additionally increases the capacity (i.e. adds new instances) in response to incoming traffic. The load balancing of incoming traffic is done across EC2 instances in a single availability zone or multiple availability zones. The Elastic Load Balancer is charged at $0.025 per hour per instance plus $0.008 per GB of data transferred through it. “As an example, a medium-sized website running on 10 Amazon EC2 instances could use one Elastic Load Balancer to balance incoming traffic. If the Elastic Load Balancer ended up transferring 100 GB of data over a 30 day period, the monthly charge would amount to $18 (or $0.025 per hour x 24 hours per day x 30 days x 1 Elastic Load Balancer) for the Elastic Load Balancer hours and $0.80 (or $0.008 per GB x 100 GB) for the data transferred through the Elastic Load Balancer, for a total monthly charge of $18.80. Partial hours are billed as full hours.”

2. Amazon CloudWatch: Amazon CloudWatch provides comprehensive monitoring for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Elastic Load Balancing. Amazon CloudWatch is billed at a rate of $0.015 per hour for each Amazon EC2 instance that you wish to monitor. For example, if 10 Amazon EC2 instances are monitored 24×7 for 1 month, say 30 days then the CloudWatch cost would be $108. Also note that partial hours will be billed as full hours.

3. Auto Scaling: “Auto Scaling allows you to take a group of EC2 instances and set various parameters to have this group automatically increase or decrease in number. Auto Scaling can add or remove EC2 instances from that group to help you seamlessly deal with traffic changes to your application. Auto Scaling also monitors the health of each EC2 instance that it launches. If any instance terminates unexpectedly, Auto Scaling detects the termination and launches a replacement instance. This capability allows you to maintain a fixed desired number of EC2 instances automatically.” Auto Scaling is free to Amazon CloudWatch customers. However, each instance is auto enabled for monitoring and therefore CloudWatch monitoring charges will be applied.