Amazon’s Web Services Getting Attention
Posted on April 30, 2007
Filed Under web 2.0 |
O’Reilly is looking for people to share their experiences using Amazon’s S3. Like Tim, I have heard a lot of anecdotes and am seeing businesses develop around Amazon’s cloud, like Digisense’s Onsite Manager appliance:
The Digisense Service Delivery System gives you and your customers the power to securely access, backup, restore and manage critical data anytime, anyplace. Regardless of whether the need is to restore data to the customer’s original system in the office, or while they’re on the road through our web-based interface, the solution is as far away as your browser. The Digisense Service Delivery System orchestrates the details at your command.
So clearly there is fire where there is smoke and Amazon has a lot of activity swirling around EC2 and S3. It’s not a slam dunk for Amazon at this point because of two prominent issues:
- The pricing model folds in network bandwidth in addition to CPU cycle time (EC2) and storage (S3) so one clearly needs to have a good working model for how much data you will be shipping in addition to how much you will be storing.
- The lack of a true database (storage and transaction engine) is a glaring hole for application developers that Amazon must surely be working to close, at least let’s hope so.
The addition of database capabilities in S3 is something the market seems to be responding to on it’s own, an example of which is Mark Atwood’s MySQL Storage Engine for AWS S3, but even Mark acknowledges that this is not a transaction engine. This shouldn’t stop a broad range of projects from building out on it though, given that transactional capabilities are not a requirement for a broad range of applications.
Are you interested in trying out S3 today? If so, and you use a Mac, here’s a handy S3 browser that makes S3 a mounted image on your Mac.
Tags: Amazon, EC2, S3, Digisense
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My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. These are my thoughts on technology, innovation, management, public policy and pretty much anything else that I find interesting.
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