This would be really exciting. Amazon has a big lead with their forward-thinking jump into the web services business. But Google has a much better reputation for building high performance scalable architecture. I hope this rumor is true.

Quoted: Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with ...

Amazon gave this explanation of Friday's 2 hour outage of S3 on this forum post. While their overall response was fairly quick, their communication was lacking. Note that the AWS blog STILL has no post about this event - forcing developers to scan the forums looking for a thread about a site-wide service outage!

Quoted: Here’s some additional detail about the problem we experienced earlier today.
...
Early this morning, at 3:30am PST, we started seeing elevated levels of authenticated requests from multiple users in one of our locations. While we carefully monitor our overall request volumes and these remained within normal ranges, we had not been monitoring the proportion of authenticated requests. Importantly, these cryptographic requests consume more resources per call than other request types.
...
Shortly before 4:00am PST, we began to see several other users significantly increase their volume of authenticated calls. The last of these pushed the authentication service over its maximum capacity before we could complete putting new capacity in place. In addition to processing authenticated requests, the authentication service also performs account validation on every request Amazon S3 handles. This caused Amazon S3 to be unable to process any requests in that location, beginning at 4:31am PST. By 6:48am PST, we had moved enough capacity online to resolve the issue.
...
As we said earlier today, though we're proud of our uptime track record over the past two years with this service, any amount of downtime is unacceptable. As part of the post mortem for this event, we have identified a set of short-term actions as well as longer term improvements. We are taking immediate action on the following: (a) improving our monitoring of the proportion of authenticated requests; (b) further increasing our authentication service capacity; and (c) adding additional defensive measures around the authenticated calls. Additionally, we’ve begun work on a service health dashboard, and expect to release that shortly.
...
Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team

This looks like a great addition to Amazon S3 and EC2 - they now have a way of creating simple tables with up to 256 attribute/value pairs. Support for GET, PUT, DELETE, and QUERY.

There are a number of things missing over a real relational database (or even an ISAM). S3 is a simple "blob" store - where each object get be atomically read and written. SimpleDB gives some simple query capability (for smaller data items - 1K max per attribute).

I also see no way to get ORDERBY functionality and, of course, no aggregate values (SUM, MAX, etc). Sometimes this can be overcome in the application layer, but it will make your application more complex than using a traditional database.

Most importantly, there are no JOIN's in this system. This will require the application to make multiple QUERYs to get the data needed to generate a view.

I found it very interesting that this document states that Amazon promotes developers running traditional databases in EC2. My understanding is that Amazon can arbitrarily wipe the state of any machine on EC2 - which would cause you to have to restore the database from some an S3 or external backup.

Maybe someone who is using EC2 for running a database server can chime in on how well that works for them.

Quoted: Amazon SimpleDB - a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. Provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity

$50,000 business plan contest. Deadline 10/28/07.

Quoted: Online shopping for Startup Challenge from a great selection of Help; Startup Project, AWS home page, Make Money home page, FAQ, Confirmation, Prizes, Rules & more at everyday low prices.

Web interface to make sample requests to Amazon's suite of web service products

Smartsheet.com (of Bellevue) is one of the reference customers for Amazon's S3 storage service.

smartsheet is an online project management application (with a Free version for up to 5 "smartsheets" and unlimited users.

Quoted: Amazon Web Services has created an exciting platform for deploying web applications based on Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service. If you are considering using EC2 and S3, AWS-Console will make your life easy.

Turn Amazon S3 storage into a local hard drive....like the XDrive service, except using S3.