Amazon S3 Needs Fast Upstream Pipes
Why buy a cow when you can buy milk cheap at Wal-Mart?
The just announced Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) will help drive demand for fast upstream Internet connections.
The appeal of fast, symmetric connectivity is not a new idea here at Cloudy Thinking. See also this item.
Mike Arrington of TechCrunch says this about Amazon’s S3:
Pricing is cheaper than anything else I’ve seen: $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). These prices are going to be significantly below the development and ongoing costs for small or medium sized storage projects – meaning a lot of the front end services I’ve previously profiled will be much better off moving their entire back end to S3.
S3 is a reasonably priced highly scalable managed storage backend. It should be a dream come true for the gazillions of developers who have a cool idea and want to roll out fast and with very low up-front capital.
I have a friend who is developing what sounds like a cool web service. If he’s smart, he’ll avoid the storage infrastructure trap.