Amazon Web Services LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced new flexibility for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) by introducing multiple instance types for Amazon EC2 developers. Customers can now choose compute instances up to eight times as powerful as those previously available, addressing a popular user request. Additionally, Amazon Web Services today announced that the Amazon EC2 beta, which previously limited the number of new registrants, is now open to all developers. Any developer can sign up to start using Amazon EC2 today at aws.amazon.com/ec2.

“We continue to be pleased by the tremendous level of interest from the developer and business communities in Amazon EC2,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations, Amazon Web Services. “Our beta participants provided important feedback that we used to improve the service and add new features like the multiple instance types that we introduced today. We’re excited to open up the service to all developers and see the next wave of innovative businesses and applications built on Amazon EC2.”

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables resizable “compute” capacity in the cloud to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Customers use a simple web service interface to obtain and configure capacity on Amazon’s proven computing environment. New server instances can be obtained and booted automatically as a developer’s computing requirements change. This “elastic” nature of Amazon EC2 allows any developer to reach the scale of major internet players like Amazon.com, but without the significant cost of building out and maintaining a massive back-end infrastructure. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing developers to pay only for the capacity they actually use.

“One of the most common requests from developers during our limited beta was for larger, more powerful instances,” said Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. “Developers wanted the ability to use Amazon EC2 for more compute-intensive, memory-intensive or storage-intensive applications and now they can.”

Amazon EC2 customers now have the choice of “Small,” “Large,” and “Extra Large” instance types, which are set configurations of memory, CPU, and instance storage (for specific configuration details, see aws.amazon.com/ec2). The Small instance is the original EC2 instance type, and remains the default. The new instance types provide more memory, CPU, and instance storage, and are based on 64-bit technology. EC2 users can now utilize these different instance sizes to support an even broader set of applications and use cases.

The creators of Animoto.com, a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology and high-end motion design, are integrating with the extra large Amazon EC2 instance type.

“Larger instance types could not have come at a better time for our business,” said Brad Jefferson, Co-Founder and CEO of Animoto. “We have started experiencing viral growth of Animoto since our launch last month and were beginning to get nervous about the ability of our small database instances on EC2 to handle the load. Instead of having to split our database across multiple EC2 instances, larger instances alleviate that headache and make Amazon EC2 an even more reliable and scalable solution for our business.”