Jeff Barr:

In order to meet this need, we are introducing a new family of EC2 instances¹ that are designed to run low-latency, I/O-intensive applications, and are an exceptionally good host for NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB.

Many complains about running databases on EC2 instances were about the I/O. I guess Amazon has been hearing this loud and clear.

Original title and link: Amazon Introduces High I/O SSD-backed EC2 Instances (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/07/new-high-io-ec2-instance-type-hi14xlarge.html

The story of going form S3 to CouchDB and Redis and then back to S3 and Redis for ad serving:

The solution to this situation has a touch of irony. With Redis in place, we replaced CouchDB for placement- and ad-data with S3. Since we weren’t using any CouchDB-specific features, we simply published all the documents to S3 buckets instead. We still did the Redis cache warming upfront and data updates in the background. So by decoupling the application from the persistence layer using Redis, we also removed the need for a super fast database backend. We didn’t care that S3 is slower than a local CouchDB, since we updated everything asynchronously.

Besides the detailed blog post there’s also a slidedeck:

Original title and link: From S3 to CouchDB and Redis and Then Half Way Back for Serving Ads (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://dev.adcloud.com/blog/2012/07/13/nosql-not-only-a-fairy-tale/

The Amazon post about the service disruption that happened late last month provides an interesting description of the behavior of the Amazon EC2 and EBS metadata datastores:

The EC2 and EBS APIs are implemented on multi-Availability Zone replicated datastores. These datastores are used to store metadata for resources such as instances, volumes, and snapshots. To protect against datastore corruption, currently when the primary copy loses power, the system automatically flips to a read-only mode in the other Availability Zones until power is restored to the affected Availability Zone or until we determine it is safe to promote another copy to primary.

Original title and link: The Behavior of EC2/EBS Metadata Replicated Datastore (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://aws.amazon.com/message/67457/

Remember what I was writing in the state of Hadoop market about having a second option for on-demand cloud-based Hadoop services? Benjamin Black compares Google Cloud Platform with Amazon services:

• Cloud Engine is a lot like EC2 & EBS
• Cloud Storage is a lot like S3
• Cloud SQL is a lot like RDS
• Analytics can be used like CloudWatch (and I know of people putting billions of their own data points in Analytics)
• BigQuery has no AWS equivalent, but maybe you could build it with EMR?
• PageSpeed has no AWS equivalent

Hadoop and MapR are already listed as possible use cases for Google Cloud Platform.

I don’t think I could write a better conclusion than Black did in his post:

This is big, planetary scale infrastructure. This is cloud legitimized and super-sized. In the words of the prophet: Shit just got real.

Original title and link: Google Cloud Platform Is the Biggest Deal in IT Since Amazon Launched EC2 (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://blog.b3k.us/2012/07/04/cloud-independence-day.html

Derrick Harris for GigaOm:

Two key members of the Facebook team that created the Hadoop query language Hive are launching their own big data startup called Qubole on Thursday. […] Qubole is also optimized to run on cloud-based resources that typically don’t offer performance on a par with their physical counterparts. Thusoo said the product incorporates a specially-designed cache system that lets queries run five times faster than traditional Hadoop jobs in the cloud, and users have the option to change the types of instances their jobs are running on if the situation requires.

Running on Amazon infrastructure.

Original title and link: Qubole: New On-Demand Hadoop Service by Hive Creators (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://gigaom.com/cloud/exclusive-the-brains-behind-hive-launch-on-demand-hadoop-service/

Aside from nominal data storage and data transfer fees, the costs associated with using Amazon DynamoDB are calculated based on provisioned throughput capacity and item size (see the Amazon DynamoDB pricing details). Throughput is measured in units of Read Capacity and Write Capacity. Ultimately, the throughput and costs required for your sessions table is going to be based on your website traffic, but the following is a list of the capacity units required for each session-related operation with the assumption that your sessions are less than 1KB in size:

• Reading via session_start()

  • With locking enabled: 1 unit of Write Capacity + 1 unit of Write Capacity for each time it must retry acquiring the lock

  • With locking disabed: 1 unit of Read Capacity (or 0.5 units of Read Capacity if consistent reads are disabled)

• Writing via session_write_close(): 1 unit of Write Capacity

• Deleting via session_destroy(): 1 unit of Write Capacity

• Garbage Collecting via DyanamoDBSessionHandler::garbage_collect(): 0.5 units of Read Capacity per KB of data in the sessions table + 1 unit of Write Capacity per expired item

Nice translation of PHP function calls to effective Amazon DynamoDB capacity units.

Original title and link: Calculating the Cost of Storing PHP Sessions Using Amazon DynamoDB (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/04/scalable-session-handling-in-php-using-amazon-dynamodb.html

A list of DynamoDB libraries covering quite a few popular languages and frameworks:

A couple of things I’ve noticed (and that could be helpful to other NoSQL database companies):

1. Amazon provides official libraries for a couple of major programming languages (Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby)
2. Amazon is not shy to promote libraries that are not official, but established themselves as good libraries (e.g. Python’s Boto)
3. The list doesn’t seem to include anything for C and Objective C (Objective C is the language of iOS and Mac apps)
   

Original title and link: DynamoDB Libraries, Mappers, and Mock Implementations (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/04/amazon-dynamodb-libraries-mappers-and-mock-implementations-galore.html