Commodity Computing with Amazon's S3 and EC2

Researcher Simson Garfinkel has written a detailed review of Amazon's S3 and EC2 services.

His new article, Commodity Computing with Amazon's S3 and EC2, starts out by reviewing the basics of S3 and then digs deeper into performance and security. After a brief review of EC2, he describes his own s3_glue, a C++ client library for S3. You can find s3_glue attached to this discussion board thread.

While the overall review is positive, Simson identifies some areas where there is clearly room for improvement. We find this kind of information to be extremely helpful. The feedback that we get from reviews, discussion board messages, audience Q&A, and private emails is taken very seriously and feeds directly into our product plans.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Chas Emerick]

What Garfinkel refers to as "long term availability" (aka SLA's) are the #1 problem with S3 at the moment. Software can work around individual applications' quirks and anything can be done in that area given enough ingenuity and elbow grease, but legal incompatibility (or, perhaps even worse in this case, legal unknowns) can either be ignored, or bring plans to a screeching halt. Neither option is at all positive.

[Fabian]

Garfinkel mentions bandwidth issues. I'm thinking of using both EC2 and S3 for video services in europe, where low bandwidth means painful playback. Is there only one large datacenter in the US or is it a world-wide distributed system?