Amazon to set up new EC2 customers on private cloud

New users of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service EC2 will be given access to a virtual private cloud by default.

New EC2 customers, and customers launching in new regions, will be launched onto Amazon Web Services' (AWS) EC2-VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) platform, Amazon Web Services has announced.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud lets users provision a logically-isolated section of AWS' cloud, where they can launch AWS resources over a virtual network they define.

"You don't need to create a VPC beforehand — simply launch EC2 instances or provision Elastic Load Balancers, RDS databases, or ElastiCache clusters like you would in EC2-Classic and we'll create a VPC for you at no extra charge," said AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post.

"We'll launch your resources into that VPC and assign each EC2 instance a public IP address."

The EC2-VPC setup will offer numerous features, Barr said, including "assigning multiple IP addresses to an instance, changing security group membership on the fly, and adding egress filters to your security groups."

Existing AWS customers who have previously launched an EC2 instance won't have a default VPC created for them unless they are launching in a new Amazon EC2 region or are opening a new account.

AWS is rolling out default EC2-VPC by region, starting with the Asia Pacific (Sydney) and South America (São Paulo) regions over the "next several weeks." Future region roll-outs will be revealed in this post.