Off the top of my head, here are ten ideas for applications one could build on top of Amazon S3:
- virtual hard drive with web-based management UI
- background automated backup application
- historical index of items from favorite RSS feeds
- photo storage vault
- iTunes/mp3 library
- generic virtual database with SQL interface
- searchable email archive
- Amazon product tracking database
- automated web clippings database
- clipart database
No doubt others have thought of many of the same ideas -- it'll be fun to see what folks do with this.
Comments (8)
Version control.
Posted by Anonymous | March 16, 2006 5:56 AM
Posted on March 16, 2006 05:56
Which of these ideas has now become possible thanks to S3 and wasn't possible before? None, probably... Normally disk space is not a problem when building web apps. Unless you're building something like flickr, and then its a core issue for IT.
We are looking into using S3 as an offsite backup, in addition to our backups in the datacenter. This may be useful. But a resellable service? Probably not.
Posted by Jan | March 16, 2006 8:01 AM
Posted on March 16, 2006 08:01
With storage and bandwidth so inexpensive, the only one that seems productive would be the remote iTunes database...that is just a matter of convenience rather than necessity.
Brandon Hopkins
Posted by Brandon Hopkins | March 16, 2006 11:25 AM
Posted on March 16, 2006 11:25
I think that the real value of the S3 based services will come of new and radical services, maybe storage for mobile networks or personal media vaults for access anywhere.
Kind Regards.
Israel.
Posted by israel oseguera | March 16, 2006 1:36 PM
Posted on March 16, 2006 13:36
Well, I thought I had the storage thing licked for personal backup: peer-to-peer, right? Now, maybe not. I'm going to make S3 available as a back-end for the backup tool I've been developing over the past year.
Feel free to check it out at www.myiback.com
Posted by Michael Tutty | March 18, 2006 8:00 AM
Posted on March 18, 2006 08:00
I work with many professional and amateur digital photographers and have been telling them for long term storage that CDs are Bad and DVDs are worse with external hard drives being possibly worse again. The larger the storage capacity the more severe the loss might be if something goes wrong.
Ideally I have told them there will be an online Bank for storing their important data, the bank of the future when data is more valuable than money.
Did it just arrive, can I tell my clients of the existence of Amazon S3 and have them subscribe to the service personally simply for the purpose of storing their files.
I am aware that many similar services already exist, but their problem is usually that they are often limited in capacity, not very secure and may or may not be mirrored. ie there is no guarantee of long term data integrity.
.Mac has been around for a while and offers most of what is required, but is simply too expensive and limited in capacity for many users(4GB for $139AU$/year). It appears with S3 I can have hundreds of GB available for a nominal fee?
Perhaps the availability of this service will seed an elegant backup style program allowing easy automatic offsite backups.
Posted by SunSeeker | March 25, 2006 12:44 AM
Posted on March 25, 2006 00:44
Doh!
The day after posting I see this
http://www.dukeofdigital.com/archive/2006_03_01_archive.html
PC Only unfortunately;(
Posted by SunSeeker | March 26, 2006 3:41 AM
Posted on March 26, 2006 03:41
First of all: I'm not entirely sure that all these appss are best done with S3, but that's been covered in the comment, so I'll make my shamefull plug:
We've got the first item on your liste covered now: http://filicio.us is a simple file storage service based exclusively on S3. And, for your browsing pleasure, it is ajax'ed as well.
(Now we've got the api figured out, we'll skip to #2 on your list...)
Posted by Steffen Christensen | April 18, 2006 4:32 PM
Posted on April 18, 2006 16:32