Amazon AWS

Links to resources about Amazon's computing services, such as S3, SimpleDB etc.

Amazon SimpleDB™ (#)

Posted in Amazon AWS on Friday, December 14th, 2007

From the webpage:

Amazon SimpleDB is 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. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

The main site for SimpleDB™ includes links to resources and a description of the service, API, pricing and more information on how and why to use the service.

Amazon Launches New Database Service (#)

Posted in Amazon AWS on Friday, December 14th, 2007

Thomas Claburn at InformationWeek provides some more information about SimpleDB, having spoken with Adam Selipsky, VP of Product Management and Developer Relations at Amazon, who had this to say:

"It's basically a great place to store metadata and information about objects," said Selipsky. "And often those objects are going to be stored in S3. In addition to being a standalone service, it's really designed to be tightly integrated with our other services."... "Any kind of product catalog will be a popular use case," he said.

Amazon SimpleDB - Technical Overview (#)

Posted in Amazon AWS on Friday, December 14th, 2007 | Via

Sriram Krishnan provides an overview of SimpleDB, covering much of what is available on the SimpleDB site but also going into some of the details, including comparing the pricing structure with Amason's S3 service, and discussing Eventual Consistency:

This is going to surprise a lot of SimpleDB users (and probably cause a lot of hard bugs). Reading data from SimpleDB immediately after a write may not reflect the latest updates. SimpleDB relaxes the 'C' in ACID and doesn't promise that you'll instantly see your updates (due to it being propagated across all the copies of your data). Amazon may not have a choice here (see CAP Conjecture) but I don't think this is going to be popular with a lot of programmers.

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