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March 16, 2006
Amazon is now a datacenter
Amazon.com has announced that they’re now offerring data storage as a web service. By itself, that doesn’t sound too interesting—there are surely plenty of other 3rd party data-stores. What’s cool here is how low they’ve set the bar to use it:
Amazon S3 … will sell excess storage capacity on Amazon’s IT systems to outside developers for 15 cents a gigabyte per month for storage, plus 20 cents per gigabyte for data transfer…. Secure S3 storage capacity is available to any developer, from college students to entrepreneurs to enterprise developers, with no start-up fees or monthly maintenance fees.
Plus, since this is part of Amazon’s Web Services, it’s accessible via REST or SOAP APIs. Now, you won’t be putting your database on S3, but if your application has to handle, say, a lot of photographs, those binary objects could be stored there. It also seems perfect for short-term needs, like the 60 million photos it’s hosting as part of the Stardust@Home project.
It feels a little odd for Amazon to be making a move in this direction, but it’s one of those events that makes Tim O’Reilly’s statement “Data is the next Intel Inside” look right. He writes: “The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces.” Data storage might be one of those classes of core data.
Oh, and BitTorrent’s built in. From the developer documentation: “Retrieving a .torrent file for any publicly available object is easy. Simply add a ‘?torrent’ query string parameter at the end of the REST GET request for the object. No authentication is required.” Nice.
Posted by Andrew at March 16, 2006 04:21 PM