S3 from Amazon - Storage on the cheap.

Amazon Web Services Blog - Amazon S3

"Earlier today we rolled out Amazon S3, our reliable, highly scalable, low-latency data storage service.

Using SOAP and REST interfaces, developers can easily store any number of blocks of data in S3. Eack block can be up to 5 GB in length, and is associated with a user-defined key and additional key/value metadata pairs. Further, each block is protected by an ACL (Access Control List) allowing the developer to keep the data private, share it for reading, or share it for reading and writing, as desired.

The system was designed to provide a data availability factor of 99.99%; all data is transparently stored in multiple locations.

S3 is a very cost-effective data storage solution. Using S3’s economical pay-as-you-go model, storing 1 GB of data for 1 month costs just 15 cents. Transferring data in and out of the system costs 20 cents per GB..."


Interesting. Very interesting. And I like the price. It sounds to cheap to not play with it, yet it’s not free (which would worry me about its long term viability). The post doesn’t mention that you pay only for what you use and there’s no minimum fee and no start-up cost... Like I said, almost too cheap to NOT play with it.



If you already have a credit card setup on Amazon, you can use that to pay. Not sure how much easier signing up could be.



There are a number of S3 samples already, from C# (SOAP and REST), PERL, Ruby, Java to Python...



I think Google needs to worry more about Amazon than it does Microsoft...