S3 - The Amazon Simple Storage Service
Go check out the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). This is Amazon.com’s Internet scale storage service available through a web service interface. S3 is another example of the Amazon Web Services mission: to expose all of the atomic-level pieces of the Amazon.com platform. Providing scalable, reliable, secure and fast storage is something that Amazon developers have already enjoyed for some time and now it is available to the developer community outside of Amazon.com.
S3 has a simple programmatic read/write interface through REST and SOAP services, and the data can be access through different distribution protocols. HTTP and BitTorrent are provided in this first release.
Congratulation to the S3 team!
Subscribe to this weblog's
Do you know if the S3 service will add support for requests from Flash, like the other Amazon webservices do?
Basically, all that's needed is a crossdomain.xml file, such as http://webservices.amazon.com/crossdomain.xml
Cheers,
Julien
Julien, good question! I checked with the S3 folks and they think it is definitely a good idea and they are considering adding support for it. No ETA on when that will be happen though.
Awesome. Thanks for mentioning it to them.
One more suggestion. There doesn't appear to be any way of playing with the service for free. It's not that 1 buck a month wouldn't suffice for most development purpose, but it does add a barrier.
Was there any talk about having a restricted service for free for development purpose? For example, there could be a storage limit, a bandwidth limit and files could even be deleted every night...
Or maybe, you could provide an emulator that I can run on my own server?
it's ridiculously expensive, no?
i can buy a 250 GB HD from tiger direct for $100 ... or i can rent 250 GB from amazon for one year for ... $500?!?
Congrats to Amazon for launching S3! Pretty darn cool. If you go to the S3 forums, you'll se I've been playing with it and have had my fun at reading between the lines of the docs.
Now to my naked question (TM): what's the value proposition? (You knew there was going to be a catch in this posting, right?) :-)
I can get very, very far on my own with a simple box providing abstractions very similar to S3 without all the scalability and perhaps less automagic reliability. Such a simple box can get me very far, and it's easy to add simple redundancy, perhaps with manual fail-over, which is fine for a long time. I can grow my business a heck of a lot before I start hitting the wall. At that point, S3 sounds grest, but before that, it sounds unreliable and expensive.
Why unreliable and expensive? Let's tackle unreliable first. I can very well believe that S3 is extremely robust given the scale that it operates at. You guys do great work. But very, very few businesses need that scale. Most need almost no scale and at that level there are simpler and cheaper solutions. In a way, that's the bane of ASPs. Scale brings economies, but it also bring really, really bad headaches.
For example, take Saturday's S3 outage. It was caused by the big scale stuff happening on S3. For my (hypothetical) small business I would never see such issues. Thanks to S3 I'm exposed to these. Thanks, but no thanks :-).
S3 is also expensive. Well, again, for a service of that scale, performance, and reliability (neither of which are defined by Amazon, btw) it's pretty cheap. Certainly cheaper than anything else I have seen out there. But for my simple needs, it's expensive! A few HD in a RAID and a secondary backup system end up being much cheaper and much, much faster (they're not across the Internet).
Since you're working at Amazon, I'm sure you will not "appear shocked that I use a critical voice to address your work"... :-) . Seriously, I enjoyed your maked blog entries. However, the questions I ask are real issues for large scale service providers. Fortunately/unfortunately customers don't always ask such questions enough...
Cheers!