Elastic IP addresses are static Public IP addresses that are allocated to AWS Accounts.You can associate it to an EC2 instance or network interface. You need to manually allocate an Elastic IP address to your account. They are not automatically assigned. By default, you can allocate up to 5 Elastic IP addresses. To allocate more, you need to submit a request to AWS. An Elastic IP Address can easily be disassociated from an EC2 instance or network interface and re-associated with another instance or interface. However, if you were to release it from your account, it would go back to the pool of public IP addresses in AWS that can be assigned to other AWS accounts. There is no guarantee that if you were to allocate a new IP address to your account you would get the same one you had previously. BE CAREFUL and do not just release IP addresses because you are not using them. Disassociating from EC2 instances and network interfaces is fine to do as the Elastic IP addresses still remain in ...