Zeus Technology, the application traffic management folk, has ported the weeks-old edition of its web traffic management widgetry to Amazon EC2 with Amazon's help - including how to word Tuesday's announcement - despite the fact that Amazon has its own unashamedly rudimentary load balancing.

One might conclude that Amazon knows a good thing when it sees it and is backing it to retain the hearts and minds of its followers. Maybe it'll improve its own widgetry over time but now is now.

Zeus employs a Web Service interface so users can monitor and control web traffic and automate maintenance, ensuring that online services are fast and available even during peaks in web traffic.

With the latest convolution of Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0, Zeus is packaged as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) template to create Linux-based virtual machines so users can create one or more instances of this AMI where each instance is a virtual appliance with Zeus software pre-installed. Users then just log on to thee instance and configure it.

Until this take, Zeus could be used on Amazon but it was a pain in the neck to set up. Now that aggravation is reportedly a thing of the past.

The widgetry will cost 90 cents an hour for a small instance with all of Zeus' features plus whatever Amazon charges to use it.

Outfits like Comic Relief and Homemade Digital have been using the widgetry on Amazon in production.

Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0 has a bunch of new features like multi-hosted IP addresses to scale clusters more easily and solid state caching to improve performance by caching more content more cheaply.

It's supposed to log every transaction failure and fully explain why any connection was terminated prematurely. It's also location-sensitive, applying different policies to users from different locations like restricting content for non-export locales or redirecting traffic to a more locale data center. Zeus says large responses won't be buffered up until processing has completed any more; data can be flushed and written to the client when ready. It's also got fault tolerance, a new SOAP API and bandwidth management.