Amazon: All your file are belong to us (and MP3 sees the light)

Welcome to today's IT Blogwatch, in which Amazon's Simple Storage Service rears its alliterative head. Not to mention a solar powered MP3 player ...

Backup to your heart's content with Amazon? Back on March 6th, Mitch Betts reported on Google's "Hard disk in the sky" -- now we hear about Amazon's S3 Simple Storage Service, from Michael Arrington: "Amazon Web Service is launching a new web service tonight called S3 ... It is a storage service backend for developers that offers 'a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs' ... They've built the back end for ... reliable and cheap online storage ... and I have to say that S3 changes the game entirely. Move over Google Drive, Amazon just stole your thunder (for now) ... standards-based REST and SOAP web services interfaces for developers ... Virtually any file type is allowed, up to 5 GB ... $0.15 per GB of storage per month, and $0.20 for each GB of data transferred up or downstream. This translates to $15 per month for 100 GB of storage, net of any transfer fees (to move that much data on to S3 would be a one time cost of $20) ... This is game changing." Michael drew many comments to his article including Kris's: "Great news! This makes it possible for the little guys to compete with the big guys again without as much up front funding to purchase all the hardware." But Andy thinks: "No business is going to want the core of their infrastructure for data-heavy applications to be reliant on a 3rd party interface like this. So to say that flickr, box.net etc. would be best off using S3, is just a wild statement right now. Supposing they turn it off? Supposing they jack the prices up? Supposing their service sucks."

» J. LeRoy: "At 15 cents per month per gigabyte of storage, it's reasonably priced.  But this is merely file storage that one can remotely call. I will probably use S3, off hand I can think of three or four immediate uses for it and my business. Offsite backups being the first and most obvious. We have large files to transfer and do backups once a week. This would create a nice site for daily offsite backups ... Rob Hof's subtext in this article is that Amazon's move is logical because it builds on a strength they already have: excellent network and storage administration."

» Squash:  "I’m absolutely intrigued by where Amazon is going ... it's setting itself up as essentially a Web 2.0 wholesaler, selling storage, bandwidth, access to a search repository, etc ... Where else can it go? For starters, let’s build an open technorati-style service but open the database up to anyone who wants to rip into it. That could be the single, most important disruptive event for the blogosphere ever ... How about it Amazon?"

» Greg Linden: "There's two obvious problems with building anything on top of S3: latency and reliability ... any time you go across the internet to a remote machine to get data, you're looking at 100ms+ of latency. Compare that to a 1-3ms for local disk and effectively 0ms for local memory (or memory of local machines on a LAN) and you see the problem ... Amazon says the system is reliable -- '99.99% availability ... All failures must be tolerated ... without any downtime' -- but you can see if they're willing to stand behind that by looking at the legal guarantees on uptime. There are none. The licensing agreement says the service is provided 'as is' and 'as available' ... Even for online backups, there are problems. You must be willing to tolerate the lack of a guarantee of being able to recover your data once stored ... Amazon S3 is an interesting idea. I think we will see some cool things implemented on top of S3, smaller projects by hobbyists, I'd think. But this is not a game changer for startups."

» Joseph Scott: "The prices seem reasonable ... this boils down to $15 per month for 100 GB of storage plus traffic fees ... $150 per month for 1 TB plus traffic fees. Now were are talking storage. Of course uploading a TB worth of data from one place would take quite awhile, even with a 10 Mb connection, so this isn't without problems ... Amazon obviously has a huge amount of back end resources already to keep their current web offerings up, so focus on what you do well and create an API that allows others to build apps on top of it ... So what sort of apps are we talking about? I’d really like to see rsync gain the ability to speak to S3 ... Undoubtedly someone will create a web based file manager that will use S3 as the back end. This is just plain obvious ... Perhaps the biggest surprise out of all of this is that Google didn't do it first."

» Greg Duncan helpfully points out: "There are a number of S3 samples already, from C# (SOAP and REST), PERL, Ruby, Java to Python..."

Buffer overflow:

• Eric Roch : Proprietary SOA versus Open Standards
• Sophos : Windows Service ACL Vulnerability
• Eric Bangeman: Google will have to turn over search data to the government
• Nate Anderson: Intel demos Robson caching at IDF
• Zach Gemignani : The Future Problem with Enterprise Data Warehouses
• Ed Felten: Discrimination, Congestion, and Cooperation
• Haris Ali:  Avoiding the LIKE Predicate with a JOIN
• Om Malik: How Fast Can A Network Go
• Santosh: ID Partitioning
• Gary Richards: Quiet hybrids pose an `invisible' risk
• Martin MC Brown: Making PDAs wrist friendly
• C.J. Kelly: Spying on your kids?
• Alex Scoble: Info for March Microsoft Patch Tuesday - 14 March 2006
• Robert L. Mitchell: Burned by lithium ion
• Brian Babineau: March (Trade Show) Madness
• Shark Tank: Easy, defined
• Martin McKeay: Fire up the shredder
• Douglas Schweitzer: Are you getting "cut off" by your new Razr phone?

And finally... Solar powered MP3 player [Hey, it might encourage the kids to go outdoors!] (hat tip: Gizmodo)

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk. Also contributing to today's post: Judi Dey, our very own Commonwealthean.