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.
Zoho on Tuesday is rolling out CloudSQL, a layer of code that allows corporate developers to access their Zoho application data through a number of different dialects of the SQL database access language.
Data stored in Zoho services--so far, only Zoho DB & Reports--can be accessed now not just via APIs, but from standard SQL drivers like JDBC and ODBC. Support for these traditional client/server technologies should make it easier for developers to transition to cloud-based data, should they be moving in that direction.
(Credit:
Zoho)
I have not tested the performance of this new middleware layer into Zoho's systems, so I don't know if it's a workable solution. But it is a cool tool for companies that want to test the waters with cloud-based apps and storage.
The service is free for now. Zoho spokespeople say they'll be looking at usage and uptake before they "decide if we need to charge for this." Not exactly a cost structure one can budget for, but it's early days for everyone.
Zoho has written a demo of Zoho's CloudSQL that runs on Google's App Engine.
This charting app is running on Google App engine.
Time for our semi-irregular roundup of Google items:
• Gmail Labs has produced three new features that people can try, according to Google's Gmail blog. One is a keyboard shortcut, "G" then "L," that brings people to a list of labels so they can show a specific category of messages. Another is the ability to move the Gmail control elements around on the left-side navigation bar, so users can reorder instant-messaging contacts, labels, and other items to put their preferred controls at the top. Last is the ability to pick your own colors for labels, not just rely on Google's choices.
Gmail Labs now has three new options for users
(Credit: CNET News)• Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user experience, mused about the future of search on Google's main blog. Among various ideas about the potential expansion of Google search to become ever more pervasive and useful is the possibility that we'll be able to upload a photo of a bird to a search engine to identify it, and that search engines will be able to draw upon social connections and other personal information to help understand queries better. Google's working on cross-language information retrieval, so search results from all languages are provided in a user's native tongue. And of course, as Star Trek has trained us to expect (and that Yahoo OneSearch with Voice enables today), we should be able to search with our voices, not just by typing text.
• Themes to customize the appearance of Google's Chrome browser are now appearing, with instructions at LifeHacker. Also handy are some command-line startup options that let power users configure Chrome to block the execution of Java, Flash, or JavaScript programs, or to launch Chrome maximized to fill the whole screen.(Via Google Blogoscoped.)
• Anyone skeptical that Google is building Mac OS X and Linux versions of Chrome can put doubts to rest by looking at the Chrome build system, which shows how well the latest builds are faring for those two as-yet-unsupported operating systems as well as Windows.
• Picasa is mostly a photo-sharing site, but it can house videos, too (as long as you haven't run into any storage space limits at the site). Now Google has opened up an interface that lets programmers better use the feature. Specifically, Google has released an API (application programming interface) for video uploads, according to the Google Code blog, so a programmer could for example create an upload tool that can deal with videos as well as photos. Video API details are available online.
• Google plans to launch a YouTube feature this week called HotSpots that lets video creators see which parts of a video are most watched, according to Advertising Age. The tool graphs activity levels that reflects activity such as viewers rewinding to watch a particular spot more often or dropping off to do something else. (Via Google Blogoscoped.)
• Chrome's Incognito apparently really does work, according to the SurfChrome blog, with a forensics expert unable to find traces of Web sites the browser visited. "There was no trace of cached images, history nor cookies," the blog said.
• Google consumes a huge amount of open-source projects for its own use, and sometimes contributes back to those projects. It did so with MySQL, the Sun Microsystems open-source database, including changes that speed the core data engine, InnoDB, used in MySQL, and that make it work faster on servers with multicore processors, according to the Google open-source blog. "We expect several of these features to be merged into a future official MySQL release, and one of them, semi-synchronous replication, is already available as a MySQL feature preview," Google said.
• Google's Steve Souder, who focuses on high-performance Web sites, has released some statistics about speed-related features that various browsers support. His conclusion: Chrome is tied with Firefox and the latest Safari for the best speed features, with a score of 8 out of 10. His UA Profiler test is available on his Web site.
• SurfChrome and Valleywag both feature some amusing re-captioned parodies of the Chrome comic book from Google and illustrator Scott McCloud.
On Monday, Adobe Systems rolled out its new Web 2.0 development tool, Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR. Following its release were some concerns from the security community.
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen talks up AIR at a San Francisco event.
(Credit: Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)AIR, formerly Adobe Apollo, is a runtime environment that allows developers use HTML, Flash, AJAX, Flex, and other Web 2.0 tools to create desktop applications. One such application built using Adobe AIR comes from Nickelodeon Online.
But some security experts are concerned about local file access by AIR applications. Recently, Firefox experienced a vulnerability that could have allowed remote attackers to access a targeted file system. To mitigate this, Adobe says it implemented a sandboxing environment, however, Adobe's documentation suggests that the sandboxes are less secure than a Web browser's sandbox.
Additionally, Adobe says that AIR applications need to be digitally signed, however, these certificates can be self-signed. And many users will ignore the warnings and run untrusted applications.
Finally, there is the potential for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and local link injection. While these threats are not limited to Adobe AIR, developers could gain a false sense of security by relying only on AIR's weaker sandbox protection.
Adobe has also provided the following: an informative article titled "Introduction to AIR security" and a white paper, "AIR Security" (PDF). But Lenny Zeltser, writing on the Sans Internet Storm Center site, notes that "many developers will be unaware of Adobe AIR security best practices or will knowingly take shortcuts that expose end users to attacks."
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