Amazon to the rescue

In his 15 Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing post, James Governor asserts that:

“If you know where the machines are… its not a cloud.”

I took issue with this in a comment on his post.

And today, Amazon EC2 makes me feel smug:

“Availability Zones give you additional control of where your EC2 instances are run. We use a two level model which consists of geographic regions broken down into logical zones.”

Here are more details on how it works. And Amazon’s feature guide for availability zones.