Amazon's new SimpleDB Service

Amazon Web Services Blog - A Place for Everything - Amazon SimpleDB

"We are now accepting applications for the limited public beta of Amazon SimpleDB!

Amazon SimpleDB makes it really easy and straightforward to store and to retrieve structured data. You no longer need to worry about creating, maintaining, or migrating database schemas, monitoring and tuning the performance of your queries, outgrowing the storage or processing capacity of your database server, making backups, or replicating data.

Instead you simply create up to 100 SimpleDB domains (each of which can hold up to 10 GB of data, for a total of 1 TB) and then start to store structured data in the form of items. Each item consists of multiple name/value pairs (which we call attributes), and there can be more than one value for a particular name. You can have a different set of attributes for each item in the domain. With SimpleDB there is no need for a time-consuming schema change when you need to store additional information in your database. You simply store the additional attributes as desired.

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All data stored in SimpleDB is replicated multiple times in geographically disbursed data centers, so customer databases don’t need to be backed and will automatically fail over to another replica if one is not available. Our key strengths are availability, durability and scalability. Customers can make SimpleDB requests via HTTPS and they are also free to encrypt their data for additional security.

As the name implies, the SimpleDB API is quite clean and simple. Here is the entire roster of calls...

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Bandwidth is priced the same for all of the AWS services, 10 cents per GB for data flowing into the Amazon data center, and 18 cents down to 13 cents per GB for data flowing out, depending on volume. Query processing costs 14 cents per machine hour. This is slightly different than EC2 which is based on wall clock time rather than on CPU time. As an aid to understanding what this means in practice, the SimpleDB calls return the actual amount of machine time used by the call.

Want to learn more? Take a look at the SimpleDB Detail Page, the Developer Guide, the Getting Started Guide, and the FAQ.

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Now that's an interesting Service, Amazon sure is building some amazing web services...