As of today, anyone can try SimpleDB with no waiting… so what are you waiting for??
And they’ve reduce the storage costs by 83% to $0.25 per GB per month.
AND finally (and best of all), they’ve added a FREE tier giving you 25 Machine hours + 1GB of data transfer + 1GB of storage for free. This is huge news. Now people can try and potentially use SimpleDB for free indefinitely.
A new social search service called SideStripe has been released into the wild. The service lets you find information as well as ask questions and get answers from the people in your social network. They also have a nice widget that embeds itself right in your Google results.
SideStripe is running on EC2 with app servers behind load balancers, SimpleDB is the database and S3 is used for larger data that doesn’t fit in S3 as well as for shared caching.
Starting November 1st, the following pricing structure will take effect.
Current storage price (through Oct 31, 2008)
US: $0.150 per GB
EU: $0.180 per GB
New storage price (effective Nov 1, 2008)
US
$0.150 First 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.140 Next 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.130 Next 400 TB / month of storage used
$0.120 Storage used / month over 500 TB
EU
$0.180 First 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.170 Next 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.160 Next 400 TB / month of storage used
$0.150 Storage used / month over 500 TB
I’m still hoping that they drop the per request price at some point.
Currently EC2 only supports Unix based operating systems, but coming this fall you’ll be able to run Windows Servers. This may not sound like much, but sometimes you just need it and it will be nice to be able to have it. We needed Windows as part of our infrastructure for one project and we actually we had to lease a windows box from another host and send messages between them to get things done… not pretty. This should solve that problem.
This is also great news for you ASP.NET developers. Welcome to the cloud!
Wow, the hits just keep on coming. Amazon is quickly becoming the one stop shop for every possible hosting scenario. They will soon add a content delivery network for low latency delivery for things such as video's, etc.
I love how easy it will be to use. Just upload your file to S3 like you do now and then a single API call will make it part of the CDN.
A new open source project called CloudCache enables people to use a simple cache/map interface into Amazon S3. Check it out at:
As you may or may not know, Twitter has had an amazing amount of downtime in the past few months and it may be due in part to running only three MySQL servers to run one of the most popular sites on the Internet. So lets say they wanted to use SimpleDB to get rid of their database issues, well lets try to figure out their costs based on some publicly available usage numbers and traffic numbers along with these BoxUsage numbers.
Twitter Usage
March 2008
Total Users: 1+ million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day
14 Million Visits per month with an average of 7 pages per visit = 98 million pageviews per month
Now lets assume that each page only does one (assume a small amount of caching) and each object has item has 5 attributes.
Translated to SimpleDB usage:
3 million PUT's = (3 * $3.079) + (3 * 0.0000280 * 5^3) = $9.25 / day = $277.43 / month
98 million QUERY's = (98 * $1.96) + (98 * 0.00112 * 5) = $192.63 / month
98 million GET's = (98 * $1.305) + (98 * 0.00028 * 5^2) = $128.58 / month
For a grand total of $598.64 per month.
This only includes box usage for SimpleDB and does not include bandwidth (which is free if you're using EC2) or storage.
Wow, a lot cheaper than I would have expected. Also, you could reduce this cost significantly by doing some serious caching (if you develop in Java, check out SimpleJPA to get easy caching).
UPDATE: I miscalculated this when I first posted it by counting 98 million pageviews per day, when it should be per month. Should be all corrected now.
