Put Your Database in the Cloud
Posted on February 15, 2008 by Chris
Amazon announced that they have released to limited Beta a new web service called Simple DB. In a nutshell, Amazon is offering to host databases for other companies. Rather than setting up a large, clustered database environment yourself, you can simply grab some space on Amazon’s servers and point your application at them - viola, instance high performance database.
While in a nutshell this is simply a managed database service (available from any number of managed hosting services companies), I do expect Amazon will add some additional tools and services around it to make it compelling. TechCrunch seems to think that this will a rather attractive service for Web startups. As someone who has recently launched a web startup (TraveGator), I’m not so sure.
Amazon is offering to manage all the normal database complexity that usually you need a database administrator to handle, including indexes, backups, etc. While having someone else handle clustering and backups would sure be a nice (trust me…we have sunk many hours into tuning our MySQL configuration), I’m not convinced it will actually work. Startups who have a lot of data, i.e. those who would be attracted to this sort of thing, are also the ones who will need to get down into the guts of the data to actually get their site to perform.
Call me a skeptic, but I just don’t think that Amazon can host a cluster where they know nothing about the nature of the data and make queries actually perform properly. They are also limiting queries to a rather simple language (what if you need a ten table outer join?) and to a maximum of 5 seconds - which will work fine for real time web queries but is going to be lousy when you need to bolt an indexer like Lucene on the data to do anything more complex.
I love the idea, but my concern is that in making it simple, Amazon has also made it pretty useless. I guess time will tell the right way for the database to move to the cloud and whether this is it. My bet is it isn’t.
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[...] While the blogsphere has lit up on the topic of cloud computing based on Google’s announcement, as someone who has launched an Internet based startup and would in theory be a target for these services, I continue to struggle with them conceptually as I’ve written before. [...]
I agree with some of the comments I have read on your blog, great posts, keep up the good work your doing!