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Amazon launches DynamoDB...We like what we see!

Wednesday, January 18, 2012 posted by Dave Wright

Amazon launched a new service today: DynamoDB. It's a scaleable NoSQL database service that will run in the AWS cloud. It is akin to a hosted version of Cassandra or MongoDB with unlimited scalability. The most notable section of Werner Vogel's blog announcing the new service is worth repeating:

Cloud-based systems have invented solutions to ensure fairness and present their customers with uniform performance, so that no burst load from any customer should adversely impact others. This is a great approach and makes for many happy customers, but often does not give a single customer the ability to ask for higher throughput if they need it.

As satisfied as engineers can be with the simplicity of cloud-based solutions, they would love to specify the request throughput they need and let the system reconfigure itself to meet their requirements. Without this ability, engineers often have to carefully manage caching systems to ensure they can achieve low-latency and predictable performance as their workloads scale. This introduces complexity that takes away some of the simplicity of using cloud-based solutions.

The number of applications that need this type of performance predictability is increasing: online gaming, social graphs applications, online advertising, and real-time analytics to name a few. AWS customers are building increasingly sophisticated applications that could benefit from a database that can give them fast, predictable performance that exactly matches their needs.

Looking under the covers a bit further here there are two really interesting enabling components of the DynamoDB service that deserve highlighting:

  1. All-SSD- the service is deployed using 100% SSDs to provide consistent high performance at a very large scale. This is notable in that it is AWS' first use of SSDs in their cloud architecture.
  2. Guaranteed Throughput - The DynamoDB service includes a concept called "Provisioned Throughout". This is essentially a guaranteed QoS model, where a customer can purchase reserved capacity (measured in queries per second), rather than paying for the actual queries run. Applied to a storage service, this would be akin to paying based on guaranteed IOPS. Currently Amazon EBS's current pricing model is based on actual IO operations with no guaranteed throughput or latency.

Amazon DynamoDB is a strong endorsement of several of SolidFire's key principals. The first being that the cloud needs Solid-State Drives (SSD) to adequately support the evolving performance demands of multi-tenant storage. The second is the idea that as more of these performance-sensitive applications make their way to the cloud there is a clear requirement for guaranteed QoS controls that can dynamically support performance requirements at a much more granular level. Finally, and building off the first two, is the validation that when armed with the enabling architecture to confidently and economically deliver performance-based services, service providers can stand-up cloud service offerings based on committed performance.

Amazon is a great indicator on the pulse and direction of the industry. The broader implications here for running performance sensitive applications in a cloud environment are intriguing to think about. Here at SolidFire, the continued innovations around the enabling architectures required to make this a reality are what get us really excited.

-Dave Wright, Founder & CEO

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