Expanding its cloud-computing storage services to a higher level, Amazon.com unveiled a new option called Amazon RDS for companies that want to store information in a database on the other side of the Internet.
The suite of Amazon Web Services (AWS) already included a database option called SimpleDB, a basic database with its own interface standard for storing data and retrieving it. The Amazon Relational Database Service, in contrast, uses a more standard database interface, embodied in this case in an online implementation of the open-source MySQL software, the company said Monday.
"With Amazon RDS, you get full native access to a MySQL database," specifically, version 5.1 of the Sun Microsystems technology, the company said on its Amazon RDS site. "This means Amazon RDS works with your existing tools, applications, and drivers. You can port an existing database to Amazon RDS without changing a line of code--just point your tools or applications at your Amazon RDS DB instance, and you are ready to go."
Amazon raised minimized hassle and increased flexibility as reasons to use the service, which is currently in beta testing.
"Every hour that you don't spend fiddling with hardware, tracing cables, installing operating systems, or managing databases is an hour that you can spend on the unique and value-added aspects of your application," Jeff Barr, the company's Web services evangelist, said in a blog post. "I should point out that RDS enables a lot of really enticing development and test scenarios. You can set up a separate database instance for each developer on a project without making a big investment in hardware."
With its years-long effort, the Net retailer has built Amazon Web Services into a formidable presence in the information technology world. Competitors include Google App Engine, a computing foundation that can run Java or Python programs on Google's own BigTable database technology, and Microsoft's Azure, which is set to offer access to Windows servers in the cloud when it formally launches in November.
One potentially interesting rival is Oracle, already a giant in the database market and, if it can overcome European regulatory concerns, the future owner of MySQL assets. Because MySQL is open-source software, though, anyone may use and modify it, even without its copyright holders' permission.
The biggest competitor to this model is doing things the old way, with companies running their own computing infrastructure. Cloud computing poses security and trust issues for many companies considering whether to put their data and business applications on somebody else's computer systems. But researchers such as Gartner, an influential but not radical analyst firm, now recommend that companies look seriously at cloud computing.
Amazon is working on greater robustness for Amazon RDS. It offers automated backup, and it later plans to offer a "high-availability" option at no extra charge, with which customers can create a separate instance of a database in a different geographic region.
As with all services on AWS, Amazon RDS is priced on an as-used basis--with per-hour charges according to the server memory requirements of the database: 11 cents per hour for a small database of 1.7GB of RAM; 44 cents for large, or 7.5GB; 88 cents for extra-large, or 15GB; $1.55 for double extra-large, or 34GB; and $3.10 for quadruple extra-large, or 68GB. There also are charges for the size of data stored, the number of input-output requests, the amount of data written to the database, and the amount of data read from the database.
SimpleDB, one of Amazon.com's suite of online services that people can use to build Web sites or other computing operations, is out of private beta testing.
The service lets programmers store database records at Amazon and extract specific data from them. Along with the shift to public beta testing, Amazon cut the price for storing data from $1.50 to 25 cents per gigabyte per month.
SimpleDB, introduced nearly a year ago, is a newer arrival into the Amazon Web Services suite. Other services let customers process data, store raw data, distribute content, and store messages sent among different computers.
The company also announced basic level of use is free for at least six months--the first time the company has done so with one of its Web services. After various thresholds are met in data transfer and computer processing, customers must pay according to usage.
"We've made the business decision to go with SimpleDB even simpler than it was before. You can now get started for free. For at least the next six months, you can consume up to 500MB of storage, and you can use up to 25 machine-hours each month. You can transfer 1GB of data in, and another 1GB out," said AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog posting Monday.
Among those using SimpleDB are Pluribo, Issuu, and MyMiniLife.com, Amazon said.
To make SimpleDB easier to use, Amazon said it plans to release a new interface similar to the SQL (Structured Query Language) widely used in databases today. It also plans a mechanism to let people more easily upload multiple items.
A central part of Amazon's online computing foundation is growing up.
The Elastic Compute Cloud, a service that gives customers on-demand access to Linux servers, is now out of beta testing, said Jeff Barr, evangelist for the collection of online options collectively called Amazon Web Services.
"Amazon EC2 is now in full production," Barr said in a blog post Thursday. And as promised, EC2 now offers Windows in a beta test, joining Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition.
Along with those moves, EC2 now comes with a service level agreement, a formal commitment that the service will be available at least 99.95 percent of the time. This type of agreement makes it easier for businesses to place faith in the service. Previously, only the only AWS component with a service level agreement was the Simple Storage Service (S3), which provides online data storage.
Customers pay for AWS according to how much they need: more servers, more storage space, and more network capacity means more charges. But unlike with computing infrastructure built in-house, when customers don't need it anymore, they can stop paying for it. AWS has had outages, but it continues to gain in popularity, and Amazon has been lowering some AWS prices.
Amazon collects multiple gigabits of monitoring data each second for its Elastic Compute Cloud servce.
(Credit: Amazon.com)Barr also described features that signal growing sophistication for AWS overall in 2009 that should make it easier to administer AWS--either manually or by letting it run itself better. Barr listed four areas:
• Management Console: The management console will simplify the process of configuring and operating your applications in the AWS cloud. You'll be able to get a global picture of your cloud computing environment using a point-and-click web interface.
• Load Balancing: The load-balancing service will allow you to balance incoming requests and traffic across multiple EC2 instances.
• Automatic Scaling: The auto-scaling service will allow you to grow and shrink your usage of EC2 capacity on demand based on application requirements.
• Cloud Monitoring: The cloud-monitoring service will provide real time, multidimensional monitoring of host resources across any number of EC2 instances, with the ability to aggregate operational metrics across instances, Availability Zones, and time slots.
In a separate blog post, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogel described some of Amazon's work in ensuring reliability and efficiency.
"We relentlessly measure every possible resource usage parameter, every application counter, and every customer's experience. Many gigabits per second of monitoring data flows continuously through the Amazon networks to make sure that our customers are getting serviced at the levels they can expect and at an efficiency level the business desires," Vogel said.
Among the customers using the Windows version of EC2 are Autodesk, RenderRocket, and Eli Lilly, Amazon said.
"This is a huge step forward in maximizing our results relative to IT spend, and now that Amazon EC2 runs Windows and SQL Server, we have even greater flexibility in the kinds of applications we can build in the AWS cloud," Dave Powers, an Eli Lilly associate information consultant who uses the service to process research data, gushed in a statement.
Autodesk uses EC2 for back-end data processing tasks, said Mike Haley, a senior architect of search engineering, and RenderRocket uses the service for 3D film and TV graphics work for TV and movies, Amazon said.
Amazon.com has announced that it is dropping prices for heavy users of its hosted storage service, S3. The baseline monthly fee of 15 cents per gigabyte of storage remains, but high-volume users will be able to take advantage of a tiered pricing model.
After 50 terabytes, the cost goes down to 14 cents a gigabyte; for more than 500TB, it's at 12 cents. See the new pricing chart.
I asked an Amazon representative if the company is reducing prices just because it could, or if it was the company's way of helping to bail out tech companies that are going to be finding it harder to fund ongoing operations. The answer is the former:
Through increased scale and operational innovations, we've been able to lower the cost of running Amazon S3. We've always said we would pass on savings to our customers when we could, and we're doing so again now.
We have a relentless focus on reducing our operational costs for hardware, storage, and other aspects of operating the Amazon Web Services' infrastructure. In addition, with greater scale (S3 now houses >29 billion objects) have come further efficiencies. As we continue to reduce these costs, we're able to pass the savings on to our customers.
Any small amount of additional flotation will no doubt be welcomed by tech companies today, though entrepreneurs may also want to heed Richard Stallman's warning: cloud computing is "stupidity."
Amazon on Thursday announced that it is releasing its persistent storage option, called Elastic Block Service (EBS), to its suite of Amazon Web Services cloud computing options. The company announced this direction in April.
Previously, data associated with jobs running on Amazon's cloud computing platform, EC2, were attached to the jobs themselves; developers did not have access to their files and information except through EC2. With EBS, developers can create cloud-based file systems that they can access from whatever applications they wish. Amazon's other cloud storage systems, S3 and SimpleDB, don't offer this low-level access.
Based on the scalable Amazon Web Services infrastructure, EBS will be tolerant of most failures, but "not as redundant as S3 storage," according to the RightScale blog. However, Amazon customers will be able to back up snapshots of their EBS installations into S3.
EBS volumes will be available in sizes from 1 gigabyte to 1 terabyte. The service will cost 10 cents per gigabyte per month.
Further reading:
Werner Vogels: Elastic Block Store has launched.
AWS blog: Bring us your data.
RightScale blog: Amazon's Elastic Block Store explained.
In this week's Real Deal podcast, Tom Merritt and I try to explain cloud computing in concrete terms. Starting with an utterly opaque description from Forrester Research, we get into the realities of using the "cloud" of Internet-connected resources for data storage and computing. Then we dive into personal clouds of data--like what Microsoft is trying to build with Live Mesh.
Reminder: We record the Real Deal each Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. Pacific Time, and we have a live video feed and chatroom running while we're doing so. You can tune in at www.watchbol.com. In our next episode, we'll be discussing the necessary tools for video editing and posting. A lot of those, of course, will be Web apps.
What can you do without local hardware?
If you want to join the ongoing discussion, come on over to the Real Deal forums.
Real Deal subscription links:
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- iTunes: Subscribe
On February 15 this year, Amazon S3, the "cloud" storage service that's part of the Amazon Web Services suite of infrastructure applications, failed. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs who had been attracted to AWS based on its promised reliability and low cost had their confidence shaken. Several lost revenue when the service seized up.
Last week at the Under the Radar conference, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels sat down to an interview with Robert Scoble. The discussion of course came around to the S3 outage, and Vogels explained what happened. It was, he says, a "provisioning" and "logical" problem. Translated: They didn't program S3 to handle the load they got. It has since been fixed. Amazon also recently upgraded its hosted computing service, EC2.
But while Vogels expressed unhappiness at the outage, he also believes that Amazon's cloud services are still more reliable than any collection of servers a budding Web start-up could marshal. While that may be true, that's not what companies who signed up for AWS signed up to hear. We think a simple mea culpa would have gone over better.
Birthdays are one of the wonderful aspects of life that set us apart from robots, but that doesn't mean the cloud that is the Internet isn't fond of well wishing people with birthday salutations. Working at Webware, I register with an average of two services a day, often times more. Depending on the type of site, they'll occasionally ask for my birthday (mostly for age verification), which gets tucked away deep inside some server farm in rural Russia, or Ohio. Over the course of the past 10 months I've been here, plus whatever sites I've joined prior to that, there are a whole lot of logins floating around.
Despite this, short of personal notes, my in-box has been rather barren of any sort of BACN apart from a few which I've listed below:
- Facebook wishes you a happy birthday right on your home page, no e-mail though. It's also worth noting their birthday reminder service and integrated gift store.
- Gaming deals site Cheap Ass Gamer wishes you a "Happy Cheap Ass Birthday" via e-mail.
- Webshots says "hello" followed up with an offer for 20% off photo prints using a secret birthday code (Note: Webshots is a CNET affiliate site).
- Sites using vBulletin for their forums can be setup to send you a birthday well wish. They also put your name on a user list of shared birthdays for everyone to see. Big sites using vBulletin forums include Macrumors.com, Something Awful, Offtopic, Rotten Tomatoes, and AVS forums.
Maybe it's because I usually set my preferences to "don't even think about bothering me with news, offers, etc." that I'm not getting more of this stuff, but frankly I think more sites should do it. Why?
A) Because people like getting things on their birthday.
B) Offering people discounts or special deals is a good thing--that is, if your site can swing it.
C) People might have forgotten about your service, and this is a nice way to let them know you're both still around, and have their personal information.
No I don't want my in-box full of marketing junk, but when done well, these notes show loyalty and a little bit of personality--something that might set your site apart from the competition.
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