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Thursday, January 29, 2009

Elastic Block Store

Amazon comes up with another *potential* low-margin - high volume business by announcing Elastic Block Store today.
The most interesting feature is of course the facility to provide block level storage. The S3 service is already extremely popular - thanks to getting away from the relational model (which sometimes could end up being an overkill ) and reducing the headache of IT management for a potential entrepreneur .

EC2 service, no doubt - is much better to create your own instance of an image from scratch and use it. In spite of having free REST requests to the S3 service , the absence of persistence as such on the image instance was a drawback.

EBS provides us with block-level storage volumes that could be attached to an EC2 instance. As opposed to the other tools that has a much stepper adoption curve ( s3 needs some sort of wrapper around REST - the popular being JetS3t ) - this is probably as simple as it could get and hence it might increase the adoption rate compared to the rest.

I have not got the time to compare the pricing of EBS against the rest, but my guess is that people probably would not mind paying up for this given the level of comfort it gives to making the EC2 instances more usable.

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