Amazon is offering a new service: Amazon S3 – Simple Storage Service. Before I get into that though, a side note, who (or what) is generating URLs over at Amazon? The URL for their new S3 service:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=sc_fe_c_1_3435361_1/104-7254936-4303935?%5Fencoding=UTF8&node=16427261&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA
Easy to remember right? Good grief. With that out of the way, back to S3.
The prices seem reasonable: $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred. As others have already pointed out, this boils down to $15 per month for 100 GB of storage plus traffic fees. Who cares about 100 GB though, this puts at $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.
Instead of launching this as an app first and then coming out with APIs, this is an API only service. If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile this shouldn’t come as a big surprise. I wrote about the idea of API only services back in July 2005. 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 and 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. I could rsync my notebook to S3 from time to time and if it was destroyed I could rsync the data from S3 to my desktop. Same idea for my desktop. I really like rsync.
Undoubtedly someone will create a web based file manager that will use S3 as the back end. This is just plain obvious. I’ll be surprised if we don’t see at least one show up in a fairly prominent way with in the next two months. After that I’d expect to see things like an app to allow you to map a Windows drive letter to your S3 account. A similar thing could be done in the unix world, perhaps via FUSE. Hopefully other web based apps will pick on this, imagine Flickr being able to pull images from S3 or writely being to read and write to S3. There is a lot of potential in this area.
Perhaps the biggest surprise out of all of this is that Google didn’t do it first. There have been rumors about Google offering a similar service, Gdrive, but it certainly isn’t available for use yet. I suppose Yahoo could have done this too.
For now I’m going to put the Amazon S3 PHP code sample on my list of things to review in the near future.
7 replies on “Amazon S3 – Online Storage”
Joseph,
This is exciting news indeed!
I was a bit puzzled by the long URL as well. Turns out, there is in fact a shorter URL:
http://aws.amazon.com/s3
I came across it while reading the release notes for the service:
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=122&categoryID=49
Amazon: All your files 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 …
…
What about the new service Diino? Sees like the offer a strong alternaitve http://www.diino.com
/Ellie
Just tried Diino. Never heard of it before but I must say I was very impresses. Besides virtual storage, on-line backup there are many other features and also integration with PDAs and cell phones. Its really instant media place shifting. Its 2 GB for free and its really worth a try.
/Steve
Heck with Amazon! Try http://www.myotherdrive.com. This site gives each user a free 5GB online drive which can be used for not only online (offsite) backup, but also to provide media sharing.
The allows the user to create folders (just like the Windows (r) Explorer), and these folders can be shared to the groups you set up (family, friends, coworkers, etc.). You can give users ‘view,’ ‘add,’ ‘modify,’ ‘delete,’ and ‘download’ access.
Unlike a lot of other online storages sites, files can be uploaded / downloaded in bulk – none of that one-at-a-time, file-by-file torture. And also unlike other sites, each individual file can be any size (up to 2GB). Most sites place a limit on individual files.
The site is more than storage and sharing – you can use the built-in view to view image files (JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP) as well as text files (.txt, .xml, .properties, etc.). You can even rotate image files on the fly.
Looking ahead, the site plans to offer content tagging (associate keywords to files) and content search. This will permit you to find interesting and ‘cool’ content. This feature, coupled with an upcoming media player, and the site will offer capabilities beyond ‘fad’ sites like YouTube.
Oh yeah, it’s free – check it out: http://www.myotherdrive.com.
Hi, you can also take a look at IBackup for Windows, which was recently rated by PC World as the `best all-around backup service. For users who wish to backup on character sets other than US/English, IBackup now offers the flexibility to opt for the new IBackup for Windows – International Edition.
With IBackup for Windows the backup and restores of files and folders are fast, easy and reliable IBackup has easy-to-use wizards for interactive backups, restores and backup/restore scheduling. IBackup for Windows also has the look and feel of the Windows Explorer with some great features to backup and restore important data. IBackup accounts are compatible with most FTP clients on most platforms providing a powerful flexible tool to transfer files.
A good thing about IBackup is that the online account can be mapped as a local drive onto your computer with IDrive. Then you can work on the files and folders stored in your account, edit and save them. You can also drag and drop files to the IBackup account from the Windows explorer. IDrive for Mac is an excellent desktop interface for working with your IBackup account and Mac. It allows operations like copy-and-paste, drag and drop, direct editing and more.
IDrive Multimedia is an advanced drive mapping technology, which can stream multimedia content using a media player. IDrive Multimedia is the most flexible Internet drive ever designed to support all multimedia formats that your PC applications support. If you need to work with database-like files such as Access, Act! or Filemaker, then use IDrive Multimedia. IDrive and IDrive Multimedia, the network mapping applications, do have SSL encryption enabled by default.
You can also try the browser-based application ‘Web-Manager’ that lets you to share files or folders with others by creating sharable links and emailing them to others. You can add sharing properties like password protection, so that people who are supposed to view them can view your files. You can Write Enable your shared files and folders so that others can modify your files and upload them back to your online account. You can also enable ‘locking’ for your shared files to avoid any mistaken overwriting. It also allows `private sharing of data’ instantly with another IBackup user.
I just signed up for an Amazon.com S3 after reading a great review of JunleDisk on a Mac blog. My first thought was this would be a good candidate for development for the MacFUSE project ran by Google. They have already implemented SSH and Spotlight in FUSE.