Cloud Computing Info

Yep, looks like Amazon finally clued in to the fact that SimpleDB is pretty much useless for any mission critical work. They’ve added a new web services, Relational Database Service, abbreviated RDS.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.
Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database.

Using and Managing Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I personally believe that AWS is perfect for any development and testing environment. Regardless of how sensitive your data is, you can build your applications and test them in a cloud environment using bogus data.

For production environments, the choice is much harder. Does the country(ies) you operate in have strict privacy, or data on-shoring, laws that would be impact your applications? If you can easily offshore your applications, you can easily use cloud computing.

Does the area where you work have reliable infrastructure?

SimpleDB

SimpleDB was Amazon’s first available (in beta) web service. It is a neat feature but it has its downsides. First, SimpleDB is not a relational database. It is a name/value key pair. For simple lookups, it is highly reliable and scalable. For anything more complicated, it falls apart.

SimpleDB is not ACID compliant and has not referential integrity. For that matter, it has not schemas, tables or relationships. Amazon says that it “eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling”. Some things make me say, “Hmmmmm.”

SimpleDB structures data somewhat like a spreadsheet. Think of columns across and values down.

Need a database in your cloud? Check out CouchDB.

What is CouchDB?

CouchDB is an Apache project. CouchDB is not a relational database. It seems that cloud computing has spawned, or at least made popular, a new breed of database. Rather than the hierarchical, network or relational databases of yore*, we have a new paradigm: key/value pairs. You declare a field and assign some values.

*I left object database and xml database off my database of yore list as they never really caught on.

SimpleDB is another key/value database that you may have heard of or used. SimpleDB is provided as part of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Here is the presentation I did live at SOUG in November and that I am doing a webinar on today.

An overview of cloud computing using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Also provides info on the business value of running in the cloud, what Oracle Corp provides for running in the cloud and a walk through of starting an EC2 instance and attaching an EBS volume.

Cloud Computing Using Oracle and Amazon Web Services