Amazon Web Services says the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering has gained hardware-isolated Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances. The goal is to let cloud service providers leverage the scalable, elastic EC2 cloud computing platform, but maintain the option of keeping their private cloud, well, private.

Only recently, Amazon Web Services launched a major enhancement to Amazon VPC that enabled administrators to access their private cloud infrastructure through the Internet (as opposed to by a VNC from datacenter to AWS).

While that certainly added to Amazon VPC’s channel appeal right there, these Dedicated Instances look to give organizations that don’t want their data in the public cloud access to the same compute engine as everyone else, according to the official blog entry. That’s a potential plus for organizations who need to meet compliance needs but also want to handle workloads in the cloud.

And Amazon VPC is letting users mix-and-match dedicated and regular instances. For instance, you can have certain applications run in one of these physically isolated, customer-specific Amazon EC2 instances, but let others run free within your VPC.

Of course, you’ll have to pay for the privilege of having Amazon dedicate hardware to you and you alone – taking advantage of these Dedicated Instances costs an extra $10 per use-hour on top of the normal pay-as-you-go VPC and EC2 rates.

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