Amazon Rolls Out The Missing Piece to Its Web Services Empire: SimpleDB

Amazon announced a limited beta for SimpleDB, their latest web service offering. A reliable, scalable database has been a particular pain point for EC2 users since EC2 is unreliable. Running a database on an EC2 instance is like driving your car over the Bay Bridge; you just know it's going to fall down at some point, you just hope you're not driving that day (and that your parachute (backup) is freshly packed).

To use Amazon SimpleDB you:

• CREATE a new domain to house your unique set of structured data.
• GET, PUT or DELETE items in your domain, along with the attribute-value pairs that you associate with each item.  Amazon SimpleDB automatically indexes data as it is added to your domain so that it can be quickly retrieved; there is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later.  Each item can have up to 256 attribute values.  Each attribute value can range from 1 to 1,024 bytes.
• QUERY your data set using this simple set of operators: =, !=, <, > <=, >=, STARTS-WITH,  AND, OR, NOT, INTERSECTION AND UNION.  Query execution time is currently limited to 5 seconds.  Amazon SimpleDB is designed for real-time applications and is optimized for those use cases.
• Pay only for the resources that you consume.

Some key points:

• Scalable
  Amazon SimpleDB allows you to easily scale your application.  You can quickly create new domains as your data grows or your request throughput increases.  For the Beta release, a single domain is limited in size to 10 GB and you are limited to a maximum of 100 domains; however, over time these limits may be raised.
• Fast
  Amazon SimpleDB provides quick, efficient storage and retrieval of your data to support high performance web applications.
• Reliable
  The service runs within Amazon's high-availability data centers to provide strong and consistent performance.  To prevent data from being lost or becoming unavailable, your fully indexed data is stored redundantly across multiple servers and data centers.

How many smart people does Amazon have working on this stuff?