SimpleDB or EC2 Persistent storage or something else….
Posted 11 July 2008 @ 10:27 am by Jim Liddle I think without doubt SimpleDB is interesting, and the new EC2’s Persistent local Storage is too. However I think for most web applications EC2 storage isn’t performant enough in and of itself and SimpleDB is, unlike the name purports, not a database as Nati Shalom outlines here.
Latency from web servers to DB’s can be an application killer, and with any application liable to spike, some form of Load balancing has to be required. There is one problem there however, there is no load balancing API. Yes, Elastic IPs is a great addition, **but** their is no Load Balancer API. You have to do it manually using EC2 instances. This in itself is not that easy and if there is a spike or a need to hugely scale quickly, well, you can guess the outcome.
Enter GigaSpaces EC2 hosted service. As Data is kept in memory (and highly available) it is lightening fast and using Persistency as a Service data not needed can be stored for durability. The combination of GigaSpaces and EC2 really is a fantastic addition to some of the shortcoming that perhaps stop companies looking at the cloud to host their services. I’d urge you to take another look.
