Amazon's Web Services have announced some new features for their Elastic Computing Cloud service today which expand its utility and flexibility for the enterprise.

The Elastic IP address is, oddly enough, a static address for your EC2 instance, but one which can be dynamically switched between instances. It's potentially a sort of DNS round-robin only without the DNS. You can allocate these static addresses on the fly and distribute or remove them from association with specific instances at will.

Possibly the larger news is the new ability to run kernels other than the default EC2 kernel in the machine instances. While the default kernel, based on Linux, is probably flexible enough at the outset for most potential users, the ability for specific, sanctioned developers and Amazon itself to introduce additional options may broaden the horizon considerably for applications based on the service.