
Amazon SimpleDB Grows Up - peter123
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/11/amazon-simpledb-grows-up.html
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ropiku
Google reader caught it, here's a link from my shared items:
<http://www.google.com/reader/shared/10769756911853394104>.

They are saying that they are opening the beta to everyone, offering limited
free usage (500MB, 25 machine-hours) and that they reduced the pricing to
$0.25 per GB per month. It's limited to 100 domains with 10GB each.

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cconstantine
This is something that's always confused me with Amazon's EC2 pricing. If I
were to run an instance for my personal use it would, for the post part, have
to be up 24/7 but it would be idle for the vast majority of that time. Would I
be charged for 24*31 hours?

If so, those 25 free machine hours are fairly worthless.

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sethg
Yes, I think you would be charged for those hours.

If you need a server up 24/7 then EC2 is not the right provider for you; you
should be looking at a more conventional hosting companies (Linode and
Slicehost have already been mentioned here). EC2 is for people who expect they
will need an _extra_ server (or two, or ten) up for one (or two, or ten) hours
out of every week, and for the rest of the week they don't care if that server
is effectively turned off.

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cconstantine
This is what I was afraid of. I'm playing around with a couple toy webapps at
appengine because it's free, and I'd like to do the same with ec2.

I _really_ don't want to accidentally leave it 'on' and get a bill so I''ll
continue avoiding it.

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ropiku
EC2 isn't free but it's pretty cheap, it starts from 0.10$/h. If you follow
the tutorials on EC2 you'll see that it's pretty well explained how you see
your running instances and how to stop them. There is also elasticfox, a
Firefox plugin to manage your instances (and other complex commercial
management tools)

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DocSavage
The price reduction to $0.25 per GB/month puts it much closer to App Engine
datastore's expected pricing of $0.15 - $0.18 per GB/month.

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charlesju
Is this down for anyone else?

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incomethax
Down for me too

[http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/...](http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/11/amazon-
simpledb-grows-up.html)

Says its down for everyone.

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peter123
Looks like the post was taken down. Maybe it was posted by mistake.

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chime
I can't wait till they support SELECT like statements. Who knows, even an ODBC
driver some day?

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ntoshev
There is a reason cloud services do not support full SQL - relational storage
doesn't scale.

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chime
I know that. But I find that a lot of my projects end up with 5-10GB database
tables that I would rather not host myself. SimpleDB could fill my need quite
well if I didn't have to rewrite all my apps to work with SimpleDB and instead
could just change my SQL statements to work with Amazon. Think of it like a
simplistic MySQL server that never goes down or has no scaling problems. The
way SimpleDB is now is good but requires significant rewrites to existing
applications that use any SQL backend.

~~~
ntoshev
Then you should probably install MySQL on an EC2 instance with EBS attached.
You need some rewriting even when you port to another relational db vendor.

Amazon is definitely not headed towards administration-free experience, it
aims for flexibility instead.

