Storage Space, The Final Frontier

Storage Space, The Final Frontier

Developers who have found our cloud computing model attractive have been asking us to be a little bit more open about what we are planning to do in the future. To date we’ve simply announced new additions to the Amazon Web Services lineup, with immediate beta availability at the time of announcement.

Earlier this year we started to post specifications for new features along with requests for feedback. We did this for the Amazon S3 Copy feature and for Amazon S3 Post Support . We received a lot of helpful feedback in both cases.

Now it is time for the next step…

I am excited to be able to tell you about an entire new feature, a feature so new that it doesn’t even have a proper name, and that you can’t use just yet. But you can read about it and you can start thinking about the best way to incorporate it into your system architecture.

If you have taken a close look at Amazon EC2, you know that the instances are ephemeral. The instances have anywhere from 160 GB to 1.7 TB of attached storage. The storage is there as long as the instance is running, but of course it disappears as soon as the instance is shut down. Applications with a need for persistent storage could store data in Amazon S3 or in Amazon SimpleDB, but they couldn’t readily access either one as if it was an actual file system.

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