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Amazon Web Services(AWS) Finally Offers Persistent Storage(Elastic Block Store)
Today, Amazon announces Elastic Block Store(EBS). This is the final missing piece in their cloud computing offering.
RightScale wrote two very good blogs explaining EBS:
Clearly, RightScale has been testing EBS for quite a while prior ASW announced persistent storage support back in Apri.
I really like the incremental snapshot backup to S3 feature. It shows that Amazon has thought through the usage patterns.
You can now get AWS server instances
- with different CPU and memory configurations
- static IPs
- attach 1GB to 1TB storage for storing data/running relational database
- perform incremental snapshot backups of the storage volumns when needed
- use a global reliable queue(SQS) for asynchronous messaging
- serve files with Amazon S3
- use SDB(Simple DB) as a document-oriented store
You no longer need to
- do your own messy scheduled backup of your EC2 instance disk data to S3
- try to fit relational data model with S3/SDB only
- worry about dynamic IP
It works just like your regular servers, VPS, but with more reliability, and more flexibility to scale up and down.
Amazon Web Services are still offered at the very basic web service level. You still need to use command lines to configure varies services to make them run together. That's why companies can offer value-added services on top of AWS
- RightScale provide a nice management service for managing all the AWS pieces
- mor.ph provides better end-to-end application deployment environment on top of AWS. It shields all the details of deploying to AWS from end users
I bet Nivanrix and all hosting service companies are feeling the pressure. Google should take a lesson here and open up their app engine offering. Instead of locking people into using Python, it should provide programming language agonistic web services.
