July 16, 2006
Amazon's services
I have been using Amazon's storage service (S3) and have just been reading about the new Queue service. Fascinating.
The storage service triggered a million obvious ideas in my head, and also destroyed the fundamental "business model" of many very overpriced storage-type services that were all front-end with low-scale on the backend. See Jungle Drive for a comparison of price between an Amazon-powered storage service and any of the commercial services.
But something even more abstract than storage, something that a user can directly conceptualize, is a queue service -- it's a message queue. Kind of an inbox/outbox but only that. No addressing or delivery or anything. It costs 1/100th of a cent per message. It's cheap.
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Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Simple Queue Service / Amazon Web Services
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed application components performing different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. |
This is a really exciting thing, with a number of progressive ideas in its bones:
- expose great power to developers, and let them do things
- build elements
- charge micro-quantities to encourage utilization
- work your way down the "stack", and try to operate there
Some other brilliant applications that have done this are
- AdSense (Google's ad "service")
- Google's "search" box for websites
- Amazon's affiliate program
- My Yahoo and Yahoo News' many-source aggregation
- Ebay's marketplace
