March 14, 2006
 The big API news today is that the web as platform now has a new world-class storage system designed specifically for developers: Amazon S3, their Simple Storage Service. Amazon has basically taken the online storage infrastructure behind their core online services and provided a public, fee-based interface to it. There’s now a viable “storage cloud” out there for you to use.
Storage isn’t sexy, but as anyone in IT can tell you: almost nothing’s more important than a reliable storage infrastructure. So it’s good news for web platform developers to have this class of storage service available for whatever they need it for. Here is a key part of your virtual data center.
Yesterday I spoke with Adam Selipsky, Amazon’s Web Services VP of Product Management, and Dave Barth, the Product Manager for Amazon S3. They emphasized that that API was designed to a focus on a core set of functions and do them well.
A couple of examples cited in Amazon’s announcement may trigger ideas on what it might be used for:
- University of California Berkeley “Stardust@Home” Team: Saved money by using Amazon S3 to store and deliver the 60,000 images that represent the data collected from their dust particle aerogel experiment. These images will be delivered to 100,000 volunteers around the world who scan the images looking for dust particles from comet Wild2. Since this phase of the project needs the storage for just a few months they were able to ramp up and back down with less investment.
- CastingWords: This small startup offering podcast transcription services were able to save effort and time by using S3 to store and retrieve the original audio files and the transcribed texts.
- BitTorrent: Oh yes, and there is even a section in the online documentation on how to use S3 for BitTorrent files. For publishers of large, popular files the amount of data actually supplied by S3 can be substantially lower than what it would have been serving the same clients via client/server download. Less data transferred means lower costs for the publisher of the object.
Note also what this isn’t: it’s not an online storage service in the same vein as what you’d get from box.net or their competitors. It is a service for developers and not end users. Here, not only there is no friendly user interface, there is no UI at all. For now you can only get to it via code. It is completely and solely for developers to build tools and applications on top of. Thus eventually there will be pretty tools, OS desktop integration, and so on. Amazon pioneered a bit of this API-only model with their unique Mechanical Turk API.
Nor is it like hacks people have built on top of GMail, those are just handy hacks for some power users (speaking of which, it could be that the often rumored GDrive will provide a comparable API but that remains to be seen and Amazon’s API is live now). And while Amazon is first out of the gate in this league there will certainly be some serious competition from the usual suspects.
What does it cost? It’s $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred. This model is nice because you only pay for what you use, no more, no less, with no setup fees or monthly minimums.
Technical details? It supports both REST and SOAP, but both score high on simplicity. No fancy extras, just core file services: store, retrieve, delete. No nonessential services. The REST API maps these functions directly to the core HTTP RFC 2616 requests: GET, PUT and DELETE. Everything is an Object which is opaque to Amazon. For more details see their site or the Amazon S3 entry here at ProgrammableWeb.
How reliable is the service and is there an SLA? Amazon says this is a four-nines service with 99.99% uptime and that you can trust it because it’s the same platform they run amazon.com on. There is no written SLA in the same form you would get from your ISP. For some this might be an issue, although certainly many SLAs have no teeth anyway. Given the issues that Salesforce.com has encountered, reliability is a key success factor for Amazon. It would be nice someday if they have some form of a service status dashboard similar to the Salesforce.com’s status.salesforce.com/.
The idea that secure, reliable storage for any given application will just “be there up in the cloud” is powerful and this is a big step in that direction.
Originally posted by John Musser from ProgrammableWeb.com, remediated by yatta on Mar 14, 2006 at 10:45 AM
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
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