A few days ago, Jeff Barr, Amazon’s Web services (AWS) evangelist visited my class and got a report of what we’d built by the course of the last semester on top of AWS. Each student had built part of a project that eventually used 25-30 independent machines. One weak spot was goods storage. Jeff promised that there’d be critical announcements in the coming weeks.

Two days later, it’s here: SimpleDB. SimpleDB isn’t a relational database. You stick values in what amounts to a big hash table in the sky. You can query that table (called a “domain”) but you can’t do joins across domains. There are some other limitations as well: there’s some latency in propagating documents around nodes, so…

Original post by Phil Windley