Online NoSQL Database Launched By Amazon Web Services As DynamoDB

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has delivered key technology to keep itself ahead of the cloud computing pack with a new high-performance, highly scalable NoSQL database service called DynamoDB.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability, said Adam Selipsky, vice president of marketing, sales, product management and support at AWS .

Scalable access

With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can launch a new DynamoDB database table, scale up or down their request capacity for the table without downtime or performance degradation, and gain visibility into resource usage and performance metrics.

Amazon DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases so they do not have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, replication, software patching, partitioning, or cluster scaling.

“Scaling a database is as easy for a developer as turning up a dial to add database capacity seamlessly or to remove it by turning the dial down again,” Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, told eWEEK. “That’s it. You tell the service the number of requests it has to handle per second, and it does the rest automatically. So we spread the data across enough hardware to provide consistent performance, which also protects against downtime. Before DynamoDB, this was something developers actually had to manage themselves.”

Unlike DynamoDB, traditional databases are not designed to scale to the performance needs of modern applications, which can experience explosive growth and cause a single database to quickly reach its capacity limits. Mitigating this by distributing a workload across multiple database servers is complex and requires significant engineering expertise and time investment by application developers.

Amazon DynamoDB addresses the problem of scalability by automatically partitioning and repartitioning data as needed to meet the latency and throughput requirements of highly demanding applications. Additionally, Amazon DynamoDB’s pay-as-you-go pricing enables customers to “dial in” and pay for only the resources they need.

Refined experience

“Amazon has spent more than 15 years tackling the challenges of database scalability, performance and cost-effectiveness using distributed systems and NoSQL technology,” Vogels said in a statement. “Amazon DynamoDB is the result of everything we’ve learned from building large-scale, non-relational databases for Amazon.com and building highly scalable and reliable cloud computing services at AWS.

“Customers can now remove the operational headaches of managing distributed systems and deploy a non-relational database in a matter of minutes. DynamoDB automatically scales to enterprise needs, and is designed for rapid performance no matter the size of the database. Amazon DynamoDB is already in use by many teams and products within Amazon, including the Amazon.com advertising platform, Amazon Cloud Drive, IMDb and Kindle.”

Amazon DynamoDB offers low, predictable latencies at any scale, and customers typically enjoy single-digit millisecond latencies for database read and write operations. Amazon DynamoDB stores data on solid-state drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability. Businesses can get started with Amazon DynamoDB using a free tier that provides 100MB of storage, and five writes and 10 reads per second (up to 40 million requests per month) free of charge, Selipsky said.

Not only scale

Of the new technology, Vogels added: “It’s not only about scalability, it’s also about performance – it is fast. In the past if database architects and database administrators needed to guarantee the performance of their applications, they needed to buy extremely expensive hardware to be able to scale up or go scale out and do partitioning and things like that, which introduce tremendous complexity. Now, within DynamoDB we’ve done a lot of innovation to make sure one can make use of ADB at this massive scale to automatically spread data across enough hardware to deliver this consistently fast performance.”

“Customers should expect single-digit millisecond response times,” Vogels told eWEEK. “We are pretty stoked about this one. This is something that our customers have been asking for, for quite a while.

“There are a few big customer groups looking for this: those that already use NoSQL solutions and want a solution that’s completely managed and they no longer have to manage the software and the hardware for it. Then there’s the group that’s coming out of enterprises with data architects that always wanted to start experimenting with or using a NoSQL solution, but just the task of installing software, managing hardware and things like that was too daunting for them. So we take a barrier away for enterprise adoption of NoSQL as well. Then a third big category of customers that have been asking for a solution like this are the ones in the big data area, where they need a very fast key value store that is able to provide them with very high throughput for their big data applications.”