see a puffin eat a fish

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Amazon’s S3, pay as you go, simple storage server. I know that S3 has had problems but IMHO the trade offs are absolutely worth it for storing large files remotely. If reliability is a concern, it’s pretty straightforward to write a local caching mechanism for large media files. I need to do this anyway for redundancy as well as to save money on frequently accessed files. Plus if you’re lazy you can always try Squid or some other hardware caching solution.

I’ve seen some mysql plugins that talk to S3 but Amazon has done one better and released a SimpleDB service which allows you to remotely store all of your persistent, relational data. My question is, who is brave enough to try SimpleDB? It’s one thing to remotely store flat files while it’s a much more committed undertaking to offload your whole database to a third party. You are fully tethered. Any downtime SimpleDB has will kill your site and caching SQL calls is a little more complicated than caching flat files. Not to mention the potential performance hit of doing all of your SQL calls over REST or some other XML based transport.

I’m quite eager to see the early adopters of SimpleDB and the specifics of their implementation. If this works, is fast and reliable, one of the biggest headaches of site management will go the way. Looks like the Rails community is already thinking about integration.