As mentioned earlier, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering an innovative solution that effectively provides a flexible outsourced data center for web services. The Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) offers access to scalable computing power, with a “pay as you go” approach that allows users to increase and decrease their usage without penalty. This new concept eliminates upfront costs and offers incredible flexibility, but also has some limitations.

These limitations are significant. The most critical issues for EC2 are dynamic IP addressing coupled with a lack of a 24/7 service level agreement. Amazon’s current service agreement does not promise 24/7 operation of an AMI, so when problems bring down your web site’s AMI, you’ll also lose your web site due to the loss of a valid IP address for the “A” domain name record in your DNS service. Not only will you have to restart your AMI and all web services, but you must also repopulate the global DNS tables with the new “A” record.

WeoCEO is a proprietary application originally developed by WeoGeo to manage the use of EC2 in serving WeoGeo clients. This solution has already brought affordable scalability to WeoGeo and its own Web 2.0 applications, and is now being offered as a private beta product for developers of AWS applications, in order to enable others to tap into the true power of AWS.

The WeoCEO application, working within the EC2 environment, eliminates the above mentioned limitations, and maximizes the power of EC2 by providing automatic and instantaneous scaling, load balancing, and fail-safe supports, including a stable IP environment. These critical functions optimize usage and provide true 24/7 operations to make EC2 a powerful, intelligent solution for businesses of any size.

The EC2 model allows scalable capacity to accommodate anticipated changes in traffic levels and growth, but management of this is labor intensive and requires personnel to oversee traffic levels. WeoCEO is an intelligent manager program that fully automates those tasks, and provides efficient usage and appropriate capabilities to handle growth, cyclical needs, and sudden spikes in demand. A sudden influx of traffic generated by something like a TechCrunch or Digg article can cause catastrophic failures at the exact moment a new site is trying to capture users. With WeoCEO, the increased demand is automatically addressed with increased capacity to handle the load without delay. And when demand decreases, WeoCEO eliminates the excess capabilities, to eliminate excess costs.

WeoCEO also provides the critical fail-safe support in case of failure that will ensure true 24/7 operational capability. When problems cause a temporary loss of your website, WeoCEO’s automated system will retrieve a duplicate image, and have your site available again within moments. With redundant systems that automatically regenerate and provide a stable IP address environment, your site’s functionality is maximized.