Recently in web services Category

Another month, another Amazon web service...this time it's Amazon SimpleDB, which Amazon announced yesterday, and will begin limited beta testing in the next few weeks. This is yet another reason that startups don't need a datacenter, hardware, Oracle licenses, a DBA, etc.

A simple REST interface lets you store and retrieve attribute-value pairs in the cloud. While Amazon S3 is ideal for storing large files (e.g. photos, videos, audio files), you could use SimpleDB to store all the data your web application needs to run. A SimpleDB attribute could also be a pointer to a file in S3. What a great way to provide persistent storage for a web application without having to use SQL or worry about schemas.

More interesting details here, and here.

Off the top of my head, here are ten ideas for applications one could build on top of Amazon S3:

1. virtual hard drive with web-based management UI


2. background automated backup application


3. historical index of items from favorite RSS feeds


4. photo storage vault


5. iTunes/mp3 library


6. generic virtual database with SQL interface


7. searchable email archive


8. Amazon product tracking database


9. automated web clippings database


10. clipart database

No doubt others have thought of many of the same ideas -- it'll be fun to see what folks do with this.

Amazon has introduced another new web service -- Amazon S3 (“Simple Storage Service”), which provides a web services interface to Internet-based storage and backup. This is very cool; it's easy to imagine a lot of great uses for this. Amazon provides the web service -- it's up to the rest of us to build the applications. I think a we'll see a lot of interesting applications for a variety of purposes (not just traditional backup). As usual, Amazon provides both SOAP and REST interfaces.