A new cloud-based database delivery system from AWS
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January 19, 2012
So far, you've heard of cloud computing, cloud hosting, cloud infrastructure, and cloud everything, now you can say hi
to Cloud DB-- databases that are hosted in the Cloud.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has entered the database cloud-service market with DynamoDB, a non-relational (ie, NoSQL)
database that is run on solid-state drives (SSDs) to speed up reads and writes.
The rapidly increasing creation of new web applications need easily scalable database access, which makes a cloud-based
delivery system logical, says AWS' CTO Werner Vogels. AWS has set up networks of dedicated SSD drives with triple-replicated
data that are ready to react to various changes in demand with a claimed reaction time of milliseconds, while allowing system
admins to work on a pay-as-you-go model rather than to commit to expensive contracts.
DynamoDB draws heavily on the SimpleDB service AWS has been running for five years, but Vogels said that the systems were
too limited in some key areas. Some operations required all the data to be stored on a single server and item indexing was a
significant issue.
“We simply concluded that an ideal solution would combine the best parts of the original Dynamo design (incremental
scalability, predictable high performance) with the best parts of SimpleDB-- ease of administration of a cloud service,
consistency, and a table-based data model that is richer than a pure key-value store,” Vogels wrote.
These architectural discussions culminated in Amazon DynamoDB. AWS is already using DynamoDB for its e-commerce platform.
A software development kit has been published, and the company is keen for application developers to get cracking on the service.
There’s currently 100 MB of free storage, with five writes/second and 10 reads/second (up to 40 million per month), so
people can try out the basics. The base costs for the data storage is a dollar per gigabyte per month, although Amazon warns
that it’ll be adding 100 bytes per item for indexing.
Transmission costs are on a sliding scale of five to twelve cents per gigabyte for data coming out of the system, with
incoming data free to receive.
“As with all AWS services, customers have full control over their data and they decide which of the eight AWS regions
they want to store their data,” an AWS spokeswoman said.
However, the DynamoDB service is still in beta and will initially only be available in the U.S. East Coast (Northern Virginia)
region, but a quick expansion is likely, according to AWS.
In other IT news
Amazon wants the IT community to know a bit more about its cloud computing services, storage, and other related enterprise
services that are sold under the Amazon Web Services (AWS) brand.
First, the company said that with the opening of its new AWS data center in Sao Paulo, Brazil in mid-December, the
company has doubled its AWS data-center footprint.
Amazon ended 2011 operating an AWS data center in Northern California for companies on the West coast of the U.S., another
one in Northern Virginia for the East coast, one in Singapore for the Asia/Pacific region. Then another one in Dublin, Ireland,
to serve Europe.
Last year, another AWS center was opened in Tokyo, followed by a special super-secure cloud for the U.S. federal government
in Oregon, another center in an undisclosed location in Oregon that offers prices that are 10 percent lower than the California
center.
Amazon also opened up seven new CloudFront edge locations last year, which are content-delivery network (CDN) services
that front-end AWS data centers to speed up applications.
Amazon doesn't disclose how many servers it has operating the various AWS services or where they are located, but
executives will toss out this statistic-- every day through 2011, AWS added the same amount of server processing capacity,
on average, than it took to run the Amazon online retailing operation in 2000, when it was a $2.76 billion company.
"Simply getting the racks installed inside the data centers and getting them powered up is a challenge in by itself,"
says James Hamilton, a vice president and engineer on the AWS team.
But Amazon isn't alone in its quest to provide reliable cloud services to the enterprise community. In 2009, Sun Hosting
completed the building and launch of its extensive cloud hosting services. And also last year,
Canadian-based Avantex launched its own range of enterprise cloud computing services.
Coming back to Amazon, during 2011, AWS provided cloud computing services to over 100 U.S. government agencies, and it
also doubled the number of CloudFront customers to over 20,000. That last number is probably a very good indicator of the
companies doing some computing on Amazon, Sun Hosting and Avantex clouds, and therefore paying them big money for various
compute, storage, and auxiliary IT services.
However, all three companies won't divulge their number of customers using their cloud services, and they won't offer
any sales numbers either. One interesting statistic that Amazon has consistently delivered is the number of unique objects
stored across its Simple Storage Service (S3) storage cloud.
Back in early 2006, shortly after the S3 service launched, there were 200 million objects crammed into its disk arrays.
A year later, it exploded to 5 billion objects, and then kept right on exploding to 18 billion in the first quarter of 2008,
and 52 billion by the first quarter of 2009.
The peak number of requests to get files across S3 peaked at around 70,000 requests per second, according to Amazon.
Amazon's S3 customers continue to swell the number of objects by a factor of two or three per year. Amazon had 262 billion
objects in S3 at the end of 2010, and now says it ended 2011 with 566 billion objects, more than doubling its 2010 load.
Amazon also says that S3 was peaking at over 200,000 requests per second earlier in 2011 and was hitting 370,000 requests
per second as the year came to an end, so requests are growing a little faster than the object count. Sun Hosting and Avantex's
numbers are a bit lower, but still in a close range nevertheless.
Source: Amazon.
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