SimpleDB – Outsourced Database Software

TechCrunch broke this to me this evening. I am very excited about a pay per drink service for relational databases. Amazon has released a product called SimpleDB and it’s going to shake the small to mid-level web hosting realm to it’s roots. During my time at NWF, we were payed a huge licensing cost for Microsoft SQL Server and now in my freelance world, I’m constantly at odds with keeping MySQL running efficiently and learning the nuances of query tuning. The reason this is earth shattering is because you can “fire your DBA”, because that’s just not true, you’ll still require someone who understands data modeling, database normalization and all of that stuff and how to make sense of it as it comes back out of your RDBMS. However, this does remove a huge barrier to entry for small companies in capital expenses. Now for just a few dollars per month a company can create a database, put it online, populate it and run a business off of that data without worrying about scaleability. Considering Amazon now lets you virtualize your entire IT infrastructure utilizing storage and compute clouds, small businesses — with the assistance of a good consultant — can literally grow infrastructure on demand. I for one am looking forward to seeing how performance actually plays out on this and how the $0.14 per machine hour gets billed. The Compute Cloud charges per instance hour, so even an idle machine costs about $75/month. If it follows a similar billing model, it’s $100/month, which doesn’t help cottage industries but is still viable for startups and other small businesses who are already running dedicated server equipment.