I love Amazon’s Web services.  They are game-changing.  EC2 lets you scale the number of servers you’re running infinitely at a moment’s notice, and S3 gives you an infinite amount of storage space.  No systems administrators to pay, no complex infrastructure to maintain, upfront cost to swallow.  Just gobs of cheap scalability. 

I’ve looked into using them before, and the ONE thing that seemed like a glaring hole in their arsenal was the lack of a way to run a database on it.  The problem is that EC2 virtual machines lose all their memory when you reboot them, so you can’t run a database on them.  And there’s no way to use an EC2 instance to store the data, it’s not a filesystem that any database engine recognizes.  So we had this awesome scalable firepower and awesome scalable storage, but no way to really hook them together.

Amazon's new SimpleDB service addresses that.  Now you can run your entire application in the cloud.  This is huge.  It’s not a relational database system, so you can’t do number crunching or analysis on it, but it’s PERFECT for CRUD operations (Create Read Update Delete).  Any transactional application is capable of running on this platform.

Let’s see what this does to an IT budget:

• Eliminates CapEx costs (no servers or datacenters to buy)
• Eliminates systems administrators (no machines to administer)
• Eliminates database administrators (it automatically takes care of storage and indexing for you)
• Eliminates capacity problems (no need to estimate and budget for potential traffic, you just pay for what you use—if your bill is too high you just kick users off)

And, as a result of this, SimpleDB is a startup’s best friend.  This makes bootstrapping a startup a million times cheaper and easier than it was previously—you only have to pay as your user base grows.  Which SHOULD cover your costs, or you probably have a problem with your business model :)

If you’re a system administrator or a DBA, it might be a wise career choice to make yourself familiar with these technologies.  The sheer financial sensibility makes it inevitable that small-to-medium businesses will be interested in running on this platform.  In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if completely new software applications are built on it and sold as traditional premise-based software, but run in the cloud.

Very cool stuff, I can’t wait to play with it.  I read thru the documentation and it looks pretty simple, but I'm currently waiting on Amazon to enable my account.

UPDATE:  It's not all gravy--as with anything, there are challenges and considerations to working with this kind of architecture.  I found a good list outlining the pros and cons here.

BTW Want to know something else that’s game-changing?  Ron Paul raised $6million yesterday—in 24 hours—beating John Kerry’s old record of 5.something (on the day he accepted the nomination)—totally grassroots—with no help from the campaign.  This is a truly incredible, science-fiction type event in politics.