Amazon Not Just Books Anymore
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009Over the years, Amazon has moved from selling books to selling electronics, clothing, toys, just about every item you can buy on the Internet you can find at Amazon. Amazon also offers fulfillment services, online payments and gives the ability to create your very own online store.
While all of Amazon’s services are interesting in their own right, the services I find most exciting is Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) enables businesses large and small the ability to exploit Amazon’s vast infrastructure by offering on-demand highly available virtual servers. These virtual servers can run anything from Windows XP to extremely advanced Linux systems. Users of these servers pay by the hour and are on a tiered system based on the power of the server purchased.
Emerge has been using AWS services for months, using Amazon’s infrastructure to expand the capacity of LorainCounty.com’s High School and College Football broadcasts. Each Friday and Saturday, Emerge boots-up a new AWS server, adds the necessary software and broadcasts the game. Since the service is offered on-demand, Emerge only pays Amazon while broadcasting the games, after the games we shut down the server and our billing stops. Previous years’ broadcasts on LorainCounty.com required purchasing specific software and a dedicated server on a monthly contract, with Amazon there is no contract, when we aren’t broadcasting we don’t pay.
In the past 2 months Amazon came out with what I think is the best offering. Amazon is now offering MySQL hosting. MySQL is an open-sourced relational database management system with over 6 million installations. It is used by sites such as Wikipedia, Google and Facebook. MySQL is used by Emerge for many of our client’s sites to enable dynamic page creation, online stores and sharing of ideas.
As with all software there is an administration side (patch the software, run backups, correct disk errors, etc). At Emerge I do these administrative updates (usually late at night while our clients’ clients are sleeping). With Amazon’s MySQL hosting, Amazon takes care of all that. They even have monitors available to check the status of the database and if needed we can increase the amount of disk space used by the database, increase the CPU of the database, even increase the size and power of the database server. I know this is a bit of Geek Speak but all of this allows developers, such as Emerge, to concentrate on developing web applications and web sites, not spend as much time on database administration.
So the question arises, “Is my Emerge hosted website’s MySQL database hosted with Amazon’s Web Services?” Currently the answer is no. Amazon MySQL hosting is still in its Beta phase of development. Beta means the software has been released to the public, but may still have some bugs or issues. Because of these possible bugs or issues, Emerge will not transaction client’s sites to Beta Software.
While Amazon’s MySQL hosting is still in Beta, we have begun experimenting with it and are investigating if MySQL hosting from Amazon will be the right fit for our clients. If the fit is right and when Amazon release MySQL hosting into production we will contact you before we make any changes to your website.
Additional information:
Amazon Services (fulfillment, online payments, etc.)
Amazon Web Services
Amazon RDS (MySQL Hosting)
