Amazon SimpleDB - Scalable Cloud Database

Amazon has announced the limited beta of Amazon SimpleDB - a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results. Together with the Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and other web services Amazon offers a complete utility computing platform. SimpleDB was the missing piece of AWS - the scalable structured database.

Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data like:

• CREATE a new domain to house your unique set of structured data.
• GET, PUT or DELETE items with attribute-value pairs
• QUERY your data set using this simple set of operators

Users pay only for the resources that they consume. Pricing is based on

• Machine Utilization
  $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed
  (normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor)
• Data Transfer
  $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
  $0.13-$0.18 per GB - data transfer out
• Structured Data Storage
  $1.50 per GB-month
  

Get started today with the Amazon SimpleDB Guide.

Many companies already use Amazon Web Services as their utility computing infrastructure like finalists of the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge:

• Ooyala - a platform to deliver video content for publishers
• Brainscape - an engine for measuring the networks in the brain
• Commerce360 - optimize paid search campaigns to deliver improved campaign efficiency
• Justin.tv - a massively scalable live video platform
• MileMeter - “auto insurance buy the mile”
• UserTesting.com - quick and cheap website usability testing
• WeoGeo - a one-stop marketplace for mapping

With the introduction of Amazon SimpleDB utility computing just got even better!