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Amazon Offers Paid Web Database Service
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Dec 16, 2007 12:47 AM
from the shipping-is-still-free dept.
from the shipping-is-still-free dept.
firepoet writes "Amazon has released a new web-services based storage engine that looks an awful lot like a directory service: SimpleDB. While not supporting SQL per se, they offer several simple operations — CREATE: to make a new domain. GET, PUT, DELETE: to manipulate your domain. QUERY: to find things within the domain. Data is stored in cells that contain multiple attributes. A single attribute may contain multiple values. For example: (name, bob), (favoriteFruit, apple), (favoriteFruit, banana). Another interesting tidbit is the cost structure; you pay for how much data you store, how much you transfer, and how much CPU time the database uses while manipulating your data. 'Amazon SimpleDB is designed to store relatively small amounts of data and is optimized for fast data access and flexibility in how that data is expressed.'"
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Google. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's almost getting to the point where you might be able to code, run and host an entire online service or site on Amazon without any colo or shared hosting. Except for the price, of course.
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I think except for DNS service, people already do this
Re:Google. (Score:5, Informative)
For many people, the price is lower on Amazon's platform than elsewhere. I'm looking at doing ad-hoc webcasts through an Amazon S3 cluster with an open-source Flash video server.
Parent
Re:Google. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think many people are misunderstanding what SimpleDB is for. It's about plugging the gap between S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Computer Cloud). The former provides simple file storage, the latter hosted Linux images with no persistent storage. This means that while you can run web servers on EC2, databases are a no-no. While some people have hacked together persistent EC2 filesystems on top of S3, these are not really appropriate for databases. This new service means that sites with simple database requirements can run entirely on AWS.
Incidentally, I run a site [clevr.com] that uses S3 for all of the storage and delivery of media, and it's fantastic. Works totally seamlessly, is very cheap and reliable, and is about as scalable as it's possible to be. It means that the bandwidth used by our main server is minimal, despite being quite a high traffic, image-heavy site. This in turn means that we can have it colocated with a smaller host that's local to us.
Parent
"SimpleDB" on a file system (Score:2)
The database — as limited as the SimpleDB described — can be done entirely in the file-system. And I don't even mean file-contents, operating on which opens up a whole can of concurrency/locking worms.
The simple data and relations between them map just fine on directories and symbolic links, both of which can be manipulated atomically. All of Bob's attributes, for ex
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Re:Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I don't think most people who think EC2 is cheaper for them have actually looked around at the alternatives. Most people I've actually talked to who think EC2 is so fantastic are acting like fanboys because of the API and haven't bothered doing the maths or looked at the competition.
If you have very small setups there are a ton of VPS providers that can beat them on price. If you have setups over say about $1000/month, managed hosting can beat them unless your traffic varies far more than normal over the course of a day (probably about 4x-5x above your base load, unless your base load is very low) and you're willing to scale your EC2 setup up and down over the course of the day, and even then you can beat pure EC2 by putting your base load and any servers needed for more than about 6-8 hours a day onto another provider.
If you're spending more than $50k-100k, leasing or buying the servers start getting even cheaper.
The one area where EC2 is attractive is when you need compute farms for temporary use ( (At the moment Softlayer [softlayer.com] is my favorite for managed hosting, btw.)
Parent
The advantage... (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, EC2 and S3, and now SimpleDB, work well together -- specifically, EC2 for things that are really dynamic, and S3 for things which are only sort-of dynamic (you want to base them on a database so they're easy to change, but it's still going to stay the same for weeks at a time). And I'm not sure
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Why would that be weird? Just because everybody is obsessed with Google doesn't mean that other companies don't do cool stuff.
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Amazon has a lot of excess infrastructure? (Score:2)
Actually it may make far more sense that Amazon is doing this sort of stuff rather than Google, I expect that during most of the year Amazon may have a lot of underutilized hardware. Admittedly this is pure speculation, but consider that Amazon needs an infrastructure that can handle the Christmas buying peaks. The rest of the year, and during non-peak Christmas hours, they are underutilized. Perhaps the compute cloud, simple
Re:Google. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's almost getting to the point where you might be able to code, run and host an entire online service or site on Amazon
That is exactly why Google is not doing it, and Amazon is.
New startups running entirely on Amazon are, in general, Google competitors. After all, Google is in the business of constantly creating new apps and services, many of them of the sort that would use Amazon's services. There is therefore no incentive for Google to sell services that make this easier for others to do. The same goes for Yahoo and Microsoft.
Amazon, on the other hand, has a core business that is not competing with new startups of the kind mentioned above. And since Amazon anyhow has built for itself a highly-scalable architecture, there is no reason not to monetize it as they are doing.
Parent
Trends (Score:2)
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It's a tuple store (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a tuple store, like a Python "dict" or a C++ "map", but scaled up. This has its uses. One could implement RSS via a tuple store, for example. But it's not clear this is viable as a commercial service.
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"Small amounts of data" (Score:2, Interesting)
If someone needs something simple, typically a LAMP setup can fill their needs. It takes less than a day to get a LAMP system up and running (let's be serious here, it takes less than a couple hours), and with visual management tools like phpMyAdmin the database can be customized easily
Re:"Small amounts of data" (Score:5, Insightful)
These start-up webapps like it because of the scaling. They don't need to go from a rented server to a dedicated one to 5 dedicated to 25, and there's no scaling issue with the DB or the CPU or anything.
I suspect that within 6 months, Amazon will have what you suggest - some sort of easy way to build a site using their tools. Even if it's just Wordpress with the default settings rigged to work with their tools, it'll be the poorman's website. Buy a URL, enter it in the dialog box, pick a theme, and you have your own commercial or personal site. Way easier than getting a dreamhost account, and way more options than a blogger.com account.
Parent
Also backup (Score:2)
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They're targetting this at application developers, like all their other web services. They want people to build, and resell, directory services; they're not trying to sell a directory service itself. It isn't that. It's just a web database.
The point of all the Amazon services is to encourage third-party vendors to charge in and develop the applications, and take
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A simple LAMP setup costs around $100K/year (that's one competent jack-of-all-trades admin/programmer.)
Mention Java, and I budget $1M per year.
Say "enterprise," and I figure $10M per year.
To hit the $10K/year price point, you have to outsource:
L - who cares about the OS? I want a trial web presense.
A - serving webpages? who cares? see above.
M - less than 1G of data - who wants an expensive admin? a tuple space is fine at a tenth of a cent or so p
you're off by a factor of 1000 (Score:2)
A simple LAMP setup costs around $100 (one hundred) per year: you go to a Linux hosting company, and they give you everything, including provisioning, backup, etc., from a single source. And you get a standard database with local connections.
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Or is it just that you value your own time at $0 an hour?
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Re:you're off by a factor of 1000 (Score:4, Funny)
I can see it now...
2 columns of 12 nerds each, all dressed in tattered white shirts and black pants, chained to computer desks on a boat. At the lead is their management cracking the whip overhead. "Code ye bastards, code!," he shouts! Behind him sits a man dressed in a Mountain Dew can outfit banging the drums... except his pace is erratic and he just giggles.
The slave ship LAMP, an interesting beast where even the best are broke. If you wondered where all those coders went after the bubble burst you might want to check the passenger log.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Precisely. Which part of "hosting company" do you not understand?
The only difference between Amazon and LAMP hosting is that Amazon is proprietary and non-standard, and that if I go with Amazon's service, I'm locked in.
Or is it just that you value your own time at $0 an hour?
I do value my time, which is why I prefer industry-standard solutions (LAMP) with widely available tools and library support over Amazon's proprietary stuff.
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I can go to a local hosting providers and rent a server plus fully managed services (up to application level) for a full LAMP setup starting around $2k-3k/year, with backups, monitoring and the works + admin help.
To compare prices with your "java" and "enterprise" estimates, I've run an "enterprise" system with about 60 multi processor servers (250+ Xeon 2GHz or comparable cores), running a webapp that's far more complex than a typical LAMP setup. The to
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In your case, a competent computer professional operates a well-designed app built from offf-the-shelf components.
In my case, a business owner, or whatever, tries to build and deploy an app, and integrate it with her existing business. If her data is in order, and she knows what she wants, and she hires a competent consultant, she might be on-line for $10K total. More commonly, however, nine months of expensive chaos ensue, and we fina
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Anybody who doesn't want to deal with issues of scalability and reliability themselves. Amazon's infrastructure is orders of magnitude better than what your average chump can manage themselves.
I'm building a Facebook app right now, and as soon as I can get SimpleDB access, I'll definitely use it for storage. SQL-based databases are fine for modest projects, but scaling them requires a lot of screwing around. They also don't deal well with data that doesn'
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"Amazon's infrastructure is orders of magnitude better than what your average chump can manage themselves."
This is a common assumption, based in part by Amazon claiming that these services ran the same software that ran their store. Well, the store's uptime is terrible, maybe %98, and these services are written from scratch anyway.
I think they have their place, but the assumption that Amazon means good engineering is a very erroneous one. I know, I used to work there.
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As for lack of tools: this doesn't need any tools like phpMyAdmin; it is not an SQL database. This is closer to BerkeleyDB (and it would not s
Vaild concept... (Score:2)
Re:Vaild concept... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I highly doubt it's for SQL challenged people.
I think it's for people who really want a performance guarantee on their queries and absolute reliability for their data, Like expected query time is so-and-so microseconds etc and the data is never lost.
Yes, you can configure LAMP but you are hosting all your data in your site and if there's a fire, everything is gone. Plus, you have to worry about internet uptime and so on. I think this really is a data deployment service without having to worry about reli
It looks like PICK lite (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? (Score:2)
Technology-wise, the interesting thing... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Reasons that you might use this (Score:2)
If you already have most of your systems running on AWS in a configuration that is low maintenance and has no single point of failure then it is very tempting to try and find a way to avoid having to maintain
I'm having trouble with the article tags. (Score:3, Funny)
Does that one tag parse as "Cool as hell!" or "Cool! A shell!?" Either way, I'm troubled, because either someone is *way* too excited over a database or there's some sort of Mario Kart aspect to the design and I'm completely overlooking it in the article.
Great idea for a start-up! (Score:2)
I've got a much better idea. I'm going to start a
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
CouchDb is a better alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
On the mailing list, I found this blog post comparing CouchDb to SimpleDB [automatthew.com]. It's kinda spooky how similar they are, though it looks like SimpleDB more closely matches up to the pre-0.7 release of CouchDb (XML results rather than JSON, less RESTful communications, etc).
Re:I do not understand Amazon's strategy (Score:4, Informative)
Some are used internally too. But there are a lot of outsiders who use them, especially S3.
Parent
I suspect it powers their recommendation engines (Score:2)
I expect that their internal operations "buy" all the spare capacity on the grid, and since their stuff doesn't need to be particularly timely, they can sell priority access to anyone that wants it.
You can get a single core machine with 1.75gigs of usable memory for 10c/hr or about $72/mo - that's pretty competitive for webhosting as it stands. Not to mention you can scale up and down a
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