Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Amazon SimpleDB: Boost for Cloud Computing


Amazon now offers SimpleDB, a Web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.

Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database--real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data--without the operational complexity.

Amazon SimpleDB automatically indexes data and provides a simple API for storage and access.

Amazon SimpleDB provides streamlined access to the lookup and query functions that traditionally are achieved using a relational database cluster, while leaving out other complex, often-unused database operations.

Amazon SimpleDB allows easy scaling of applications as well. For the Beta release, a single domain is limited in size to 10 gigabytes and 100 domains. Over time these limits may be raised, Amazon says.

The service runs within Amazon's high-availability data centers and fully indexed user data is stored redundantly across multiple servers and data centers.

Amazon SimpleDB is designed to integrate easily with other web-scale services such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. For example, developers can run their applications in Amazon EC2 and store their data objects in Amazon S3. Amazon SimpleDB can then be used to query the object metadata from within the application in Amazon EC2 and return pointers to the objects stored in Amazon S3.

Developers and users pay only for what they use; there are no minimum fees.

Machine use costs $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed. Data transfer in
$0.10 per gigabyte. Data transfer out varies based on volume. Costs are $0.18 per GB for the first 10 TB per month; $0.16 per GB for the next 40 TB and $0.13 per GB over 50 TB.

Structured data storage costs $1.50 per GB-month.

The point is that it is becoming easier by the day to create, store and execute applications based entirely "in the cloud," without ownership or lease of data facilities, access pipes or servers to support those apps. At some point, highly-distributed workforces or end user bases will find it congenial in the extreme to support remote users with services always available through a standard Web browser, with the latest version, with no need for loading updates, patches or extensions.

As software becomes a service, computing infrastructure also is becoming a utility or service as well.

1 comment:

Kenji ROI said...

This is very useful Information about Amazon Services. It is very useful to me. Thanks for share this content with us.

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