Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is getting some attention on the latest geegaw to go with its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service. Amazon said it will make web-scale computing easier for developers.

The eCommerce giant explains it in detail on its Web Services page.

Since InternetNews.com last covered this service, Amazon.com has tossed in some more features, namely what it calls Elastic IPs -- static IPs for dynamic cloud computing.

Here's the pitch:

An Elastic IP address is associated with your account not a particular instance, and you control that address until you choose to explicitly release it. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, Elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or Availability Zone failures by programmatically remapping your public IP addresses to any instance in your account.

The larger story here is that Amazon is getting more serious about its cloud computing services -- probably based on a pretty solid uptake on the EC2 beta so far. It keeps EC2 in the same conversations as hosted applications, software as a service (SaaS), Web Services and how software is increasingly sold: like a utility you pay for on a meter.

Amazon is basically building out more cred by saying to potential customers: Applications will be well-cared for here. But in addition, it's a move that will eventually get merchants to deploy Web services behind the scenes -- applications talking to eachother on orders and other logistics stuff that puts Web services to work behind the scenes for a company that makes the bulk of its bread and butter selling books and gadgets in the physical world.

So the latest on EC2 serves a few purposes. It gets folks to take another look at the Web Services menu the e commerce giant is building out. Plus, it fits in with Amazon's SimpleDB (um, hello Microsoft), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.

Looks like Amazon’s getting more religion about selling products that are easily served up, rather than boxed up and shipped out through the mail.

There's, of course, the DRM-free online music sales sales it launched last year, one more piece of its digital content strategy since the debut of Kindle, the electronic book reader. Amazon also launched software sales via downloads in January of tax prep software and is keen to expand its offerings there. The timing on Web services with the latest on EC2 just adds one more piece to the computing cloud at Amazon.