Amazon Storage Space Beats Google To The Punch
Move over Google GSpace (rumors), here comes something meatier. Amazon Web Services is now offering an unlimited data storage service aimed at software developers who are creating new sites and services – Amazon S3. The space is incredibly affordable, at $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred.
The Amazon S3 interface can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.
Amazon S3 gives developers access to “the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.”
Amazon S3 Functionality – Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set.
* Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
* Each object is stored and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
* Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.
* Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
* Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent (TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.
And what can Amazon’s S3 add to the search and Web 2.0 world of everyday launches and offerings? Well, it seems just aboout everyone from college students to NASA can make use of the content storage.
Adrian at Arcane Denials, who’s coverage of Amazon S3 is getting great coverage on Digg lends his thoughts.
“This could help spur a whole bunch of new Web mash-ups and other services. Already, a few groups have been using the service, among them a UC Berkeley team running NASA’s Stardust@Home project that involves 60,000 images to 100,000 volunteers worldwide so they can scan them for comet dust, the podcasting transcription service CastingWords for storing MP3 files, and FilmmakerLIVE.com for sharing digital storyboard elements.
All these folks need a lot of storage, but it’s not that easy to set up storage services cheaply, easily, and reliably at the same time. Amazon’s offering up real estate on the same storage system that it uses for its own collection of Web sites around the world for 15 cents per gigabyte of storage per month and 20 cents per gigabyte of storage transferred. I’m told that’s cheaper than a lot of hosting services.
What I find most interesting from a business standpoint is that this looks like the clearest step yet that Amazon has taken beyond the retail business model on which it was created. And it should put to rest the notion, still popular among a few analysts, that Amazon is just a retailer.”
