Amazon Beckons Developers with Lush Storage Interface
|
Written By Reprise Media | March 14, 2006 | Share This
|
|
If we’ve gotten a bit leafy in here today with the pics, we apologize; it’s this new waterfall. And this story about Amazon’s new S3 data storage service we saw making the rounds today; it’s designed to make “web-scale computing easier for developers.”
Beta News reports that the offering from the increasingly digressive net retailer would allow its clients to store and retrieve vast amounts of data - using Amazon’s infrastructure - from anywhere on the web for a relatively small fee. Objects could range in size from 1 byte to 5 gigs, and each would be assigned its own security key. The article notes that although S3 is being marketed mainly to developers, it’s already being used for a variety of projects, including a UC Berkeley comet dust-related undertaking, an audio podcast transcription venture and a motion picture storyboarding outfit.
The S3 buzz says that it’s a) awesome! and b) rife with complications. Put Mike at Techdirt in camp ‘a.’ “This isn’t about storage, even though that’s what most people will talk about,” he says - although given the brouhaha of last week’s ’store-everything’ GDrive leakage, it’s difficult not to make that connection. “This is about being the file system and database on which web apps are built. That’s much more powerful than just storage.” He continues:
“…If Amazon really can convince people that it’s providing the basics they need to build the next generation of web apps, Amazon just became a much more interesting company - not by copying Google and Yahoo, but by going beyond them and doing what both companies have yet to do.”
That’s some ‘if.’ And it’s not just the ‘if’s that are leaving Greg Linden a bit cool. He’s not sure S3 can even realistically deliver on its promises now (he calls them “marketing goo”), particularly in terms of speed and reliability. He says that the latency inherent in cross-net data retrieval would make it impossible to serve the needs of a real-time web page, and he also points out that Amazon makes no “legal guarantees” as to the availability of their system. “I think we will see some cool things implemented on top of S3, smaller projects by hobbyists, I’d think,” he says. “But this
is not a game changer for startups.” Maybe not. But even if it’s not a game changer, it’s intriguing to see Amazon trying to make a play.
Topics: Technology |