Amazon Launches SimpleDB: Your Database in the Cloud

Amazon has finally announced SImpleDB, a database in the cloud. As they say on the product description page "Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time." The service is now in closed Beta -- if you are interested apply now I am sure its going to fill up.

Unlike S3 which only allows you to write, read or delete files, with SimpleDB you can run the following commands:

# 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.

You only pay for the services that you use. The pricing is very similar to Amazon's Simple Storage Service, but with two major differences.
- The cost of structured data storage is an order of magnitude different. What it costs $0.15 per GB-month on S3 costs $1.50 per GB-Month on SimpleDB.
- There is a machine utilization fee of $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed. S3 has no analogous fee. Amazon explains it as:

Amazon SimpleDB measures the machine utilization of each request and charges based on the amount of machine capacity used to complete the particular request (QUERY, GET, PUT, etc.), normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor.

EC2 charges $.10 per hour for a small machine instance and $.40 per hour for a large instance.

There are of course many questions that remain to be answered. Can web apps get the performance they need? Does the pricing work with their data throughput needs? Will it scale as a site does?

This service has been an open secret within the AWS startup community. A lot of startups have been waiting for this service to open. One told me last week that they couldn't wait any longer and were going to build,their own -- I hope that they get into the Beta.

I've grabbed the pricing for S3 and SimpleDB after the jump.

SimpleDB Pricing

Data Transfer

$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer "in" and "out" refers to transfer into and out of Amazon SimpleDB. Data transferred between Amazon SimpleDB and other Amazon Web Services is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB).

Structured Data Storage - $1.50 per GB-month

Amazon SimpleDB measures the size of your billable data by adding the raw byte size of the data you upload + 45 bytes of overhead for each item, attribute name and attribute-value pair.

S3 Pricing

United States

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests