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Originally Posted by rowan
Hmm... it says data size is limited to 10GB during beta, and "Amazon SimpleDB is designed to store relatively small amounts of data and is optimized for fast data access and flexibility in how that data is expressed."
Still, something to keep an eye on. It was Amazon's EC2 service that got me thinking about scalable third party database providers.
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I've been told the 10GB limit will go away outside of beta.
By small amounts of data they are really comparing it with S3. 1k chunks or smaller, go in SimpleDB, larger binaries go into S3.
Really what this means is you could build a data driven website with your database taken care of by Amazon, and the static files also hosted by them with infinite scalability. You just need to provide the business logic that holds the two together.
I can't help but assume that EC2 will be upgraded to fill that middle tier at some point.
The basic premise is all the same though, why buy enough hardware to process 100 widgets/second, if you only need that throughput 1% of the time.
Lastly, most databases for this industry are very suited for the SimpleDB layout. you're talking about mostly read-access databases, and a lot of the functionality relational databases provide is overkill.
Lastly, the S3 security model for securing urls is widely underappreciated. You can generate download links which are only valid for say 30 minutes. A ghetto use of this would be to prevent hotlinking completely. If anyone copy/pastes one of your image urls onto their site, the url is worthless after 30 minutes. The url generation code runs locally on your server, so it is pretty much painless to add from a performance perspective.
Anyhow, there are plenty of S3 haters on this thread, but if anyone wants to have a serious discussion feel free to track me down via my website contact info.