Persistant Storage for EC2 is coming
I received an email from Amazon Web Services this morning about a new service that will be coming out later this year that AWS is dubbing Persistent Storage. This is great news for flex developers who want to target utilize AWS as a backend. For those of you that are not familiar with some of the problems associated with developing in the cloud, I’ll explain it as this: It’s easy to create an instance on EC2 and get BlazeDS, MySQL and java up and running, develop your backend code go, but as soon as you shut down your instance, your instance is lost. Poof, just like that it’s gone faster than Kiser Soze in The Usual Suspects. That includes when AWS goes down. Not being able to persist data is obviously a problem. Hopefully EC2 Persistence will help sort this out and allow us to persist such things as MySQL instances. Here’s some info straight from Amazon:
This new feature provides reliable, persistent storage volumes, for use with Amazon EC2 instances. These volumes exist independently from any Amazon EC2 instances, and will behave like raw, unformatted hard drives or block devices, which may then be formatted and configured based on the needs of your application. The volumes will be significantly more durable than the local disks within an Amazon EC2 instance. Additionally, our persistent storage feature will enable you to automatically create snapshots of your volumes and back them up to Amazon S3 for even greater reliability.
You will be able to create volumes ranging in size from 1 GB to 1 TB, and will be able to attach multiple volumes to a single instance. Volumes are designed for high throughput, low latency access from Amazon EC2, and can be attached to any running EC2 instance where they will show up as a device inside of the instance. This feature will make it even easier to run everything from relational databases to distributed file systems to Hadoop processing clusters using Amazon EC2.
When persistent storage is launched, Amazon EC2 will be adding several new APIs to support the persistent storage feature. Included will be calls to manage your volume (CreateVolume, DeleteVolume), mount your volume to your instance (AttachVolume, DetachVolume) and save snapshots to Amazon S3 (CreateSnapshot, DeleteSnapshot).
It’s unclear when this feature will be available however. I signed up to be on the waiting list for the Private offering. It’s nice that AWS is starting to let info trickle out. Coming on the heels of Google AppEngine announcement last week this might be a sign of things to come between the two. Competition is good. I still currently believe that both services have very defined pros and cons. Also, with Flex it’ll be easy to integrate the two and leverage both. It looks like Microsoft is once again contempt to sit on the sidelines and then copy everybody to jump in after it’s too late.
Oh and if you want to be a Data Service Manager: Amazon is hiring.
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