Over the past 3 years, Amazon has been releasing Web Services for developer use. Some of which were related to Amazon products and quite a few unrelated. With Amazon’s latest rollout, SimpleDB, they have quietly released the starter kit for any online service company.
In a time where the technology industry is focused on Web 2.0 and data accessibility, we’ve seen little growth in infrastructure technology. Sure you have your frameworks, your databases, but no one has thought of providing a low barrier of entry infrastructure product. All of these services have came about from Amazon’s own internal use, so the technology has been proven to work for Amazon, why wouldn’t it work for everyone?
The basics of an infrastructure should be; application hosting services, messaging services, storage, databases, and a payment service. For application hosting services, Amazon provides EC2. EC2 enables a developer to create an image of an application and upload it to a virtual computing environment. If another instance is required, EC2 allows you to expand your virtual cloud to accommodate.
At times, you need applications to be able to communicate with each other in a distributed fashion. These services are typically called Message Queues or Buses. Amazon calls it Simple Queue.
Most applications will require some level of data persistence. Amazon started this by offering S3, a basic storage system that can hold up to 5GB of data per item. Until recently, application developers that utilized S3 were expected to maintain their own mechanisms of data discovery, database indexes. With the release of SimpleDB, basic functionality of a database are available. Not all, but enough to create a map of attributes that can be queried upon.
When your application is ready to charge its users, Amazon FPS is available as a payment gateway.
Now all of this sounds wonderful and that Amazon has provided you a way to not pay for infrastructure. That’s not entirely correct. For one, Amazon does charge by CPU cycles, bandwidth, and storage. Depending on your use, the costs can outweigh the benefit of building your own infrastructure. As mentioned before, these services were born out of Amazon’s own use, so there is a change that they will not service the needs of all application developers. What’s great is that you can pick and choose, the application is responsible for delegating. This enables applications to remain flexible behind the scenes.
These services will not necessarily be suitable for large companies, but for small companies trying to get something out quickly, Amazon’s Web Services will certainly help reduce costs and time to market. Brilliant work Amazon!