Persistent Storage in EC2 later this year
Apr 14th, 2008 by James Murty
Amazon is working on a significant new feature for the EC2 service: persistent storage. According to this pre-announcement post in the developer forums, EC2 users will be able to create storage volumes that exist separately from individual instances, but which can be attached to your instances on demand. These storage volumes will look like normal block devices to your instance, meaning you can format and combine them in any way you want.
The persistent storage feature is still in the testing stages and is not yet available to the general public. There is more information available on the Amazon Web Services Blog and on the RightScale blog, where they have access to the trial version.
A robust, flexible and reliable persistent storage mechanism could revolutionise the EC2 service, and will definitely simplify the process of deploying your applications to the cloud. However, I wonder whether this feature will damage the third-party providers who already offer persistence solutions for EC2.
As Amazon continues to develop and improve their infrastructure services, they will need to be careful to avoid wiping out the third-party vendor ecosystem based on these services.
James, thanks for linking to our blog. You are very correct that Amazon has to be careful about the ecosystem of third-party vendors they are creating. We keep in constant touch to ensure that we’re building on top of AWS and stay out of their roadmap. I know that they’ve been in touch with the other persistent storage solution vendors, so at least they’ve been communicating. Before providing value-add services in the AWS ecosystem it’s important to think about what Amazon is likely to do themselves and to talk to them. They’ve been very secretive, but things they’re starting to open up and if you have a serious project they will talk.
James
Thanks for this information about Persistant Storage. It is very helpful.
I have added your blog feed to my RSS Reader and I am looking forward to reading your blog!
Best regards
Willem
Yeah, this will make a lot of people’s lives so much easier, no more fiddling with heartbeats, trying to make sure everything is synced. It will literally be brain-dead easy to create super robust systems.